ams announced the launch of the AS6221, a digital temperature sensor, which the company claims to be the world’s most accurate temperature sensor.
The AS6221 achieves measurement accuracy of ±0.09°C, over a temperature range from 20°C to 42°C, making it ideal for the measurement of the human body or skin temperature. No competing digital temperature sensor on the market today can achieve accuracy better than ±0.10°C.
Housed in a WLCSP package, the AS6221 has a footprint of just 1.5mm x 1mm, and draws 6µA at an output data rate of 4Hz. Stand-by current is just 0.1µA.
This compact and low-power sensor is well suited to battery-powered portable and wearable devices, such as premium lifestyle or fitness monitoring wristbands, and smartwatches. In high-end computing systems and servers, it also enables the precise regulation of the operation of the processor to maximize system throughput while avoiding overheating, reports BusinessWire.
The introduction of the AS6221 extends ams’ position in the market for health monitoring technology, alongside existing products such as the AS7038RB blood oxygen monitoring device, AS7030B biosensor, devices for medical imaging systems, and the NanEye family of image sensors for endoscopy.
Alexander Rensink, Business Segment Manager Position Sensors at ams, said: “In high-end consumer products such as smartwatches and lifestyle monitoring wristbands, skin temperature is a critical metric, and so design engineers devote an enormous amount of time and effort to achieving and then validating high temperature measurement accuracy across all operating conditions. The introduction today of the AS6221 makes that task easier, providing more accurate measurement outputs, easing the integration of temperature sensing into the system, and giving the flexibility to support a range of operating voltages.”
The high accuracy of the AS6221 is specified across the device’s entire supply voltage range of 1.7V to 3.6V. By contrast, the most accurate competing sensors can only achieve their highest accuracy at a single voltage point, producing less accurate outputs across the rest of their operating voltage range.
The sensor offers a short measurement conversion time of 35ms. Its full operating temperature range is -40°C to 125°C.
A complete digital temperature sensor system, the AS6221 requires no calibration or linearization. It provides its measurement outputs via a standard I2C interface and includes eight I2C addresses.
The AS6221 also offers an alarm function, to alert the user when a temperature threshold is crossed. The temperature value for the alarm function may be set by a host processor via the device’s register instruction set.
The AS6221 temperature sensor is available for sampling on the company’s website.
