Toward a generic on chip conditioning system for strain gage sensors

This paper presents a generic conditioning system based on a programmable chip adaptable to a wide range of strain gage sensors. The architecture of this system consists of analog and digital hardware. In order to obtain a high flexibility and reconfigurability, digital hardware and software modules are implemented on a field programmable gate array (FPGA) including a core processor. Thermal compensation algorithm, which is the main functionality of the system, and its hardware and software implementation, is used in order to evaluate the system performances. Tradeoffs between time consuming and efficiency is studied trough several methodologies. Experimental results and analysis for three different sensors in the temperature scale −30 °C to +150 °C are presented.