New serial transceiver products for simplifying sensing and control systems

THine Electronics, Inc has released its new serial transceiver products, THCS253 and THCS254, that allow systems with many peripheral sensors to simplify cabling for the sensor and control functions. These products facilitate system cost, size, and weight reductions and deliver future options to add new sensors with minimal design efforts.

The products are the industry-first unique LSI products that can serialise different types of signals and allow users to add further sensor functions to systems by simply changing registers’ settings.

For example, THCS253 can serialise sensing signals using 32 GPIO interfaces into two differential signals, drastically decreasing the number of cables and connectors by up to 88%. Users obtain exceptional advantages in lowering costs, shrinking sizes, lowering weights, reducing noise emission from many cables, and improving productivity and quality in manufacturing processes by simplifying assemblies that would need many cable interconnects.

These new serial transceivers allow systems to be readily expanded with newly required sensing demands in the future. These expansions previously needed extensive redesign efforts with high redesigning costs, but with the devices, only simple changes to registers’ settings are required. Users can set 32 GPIO pins on the THCS253s and 20 GPIO pins on the THCS254s as their intended signals. These serial transceivers also support up to two systems of I2C and support independent clock signals of the main system board and the function board with sensors, touch panels, etc. These industry-unique products permit future expansion for extra features on the same platform systems with minimal redesign efforts or any use of FPGAs that require time-consuming redesigns.

Since the devices can reshape waveforms in their receiving circuit, they can transmit data for long distances of 10m. Without these new products, only about 1m would be feasible transmission distances. This gives users excellent flexibility in the layout of manufacturing sites or warehouses.

“THine’s new serial transceiver products can help innovative customers to achieve optimal and flexible design for smarter cable wiring in their digital transformation systems,” said Mr Yoichiro Minami, president and COO of THine Electronics, Inc. “It is our great pleasure to contribute to customers’ valuable solutions for minimising costs and time-to-market as well as improving performance, flexible design and hardware reliability.”

Typical application areas include printers, projectors, and compact consumer electronics with wide flexible flat cables for miniaturising; industrial equipment for measuring, analysis, inspection, and manufacturing with expensive fine coaxial cables for reducing costs of cables; drones and unmanned vehicles with batteries for reducing weight; autonomous warehouse robotics, factory AGVs, manufacturing robotics, and vending machines with independent controlling signals required to the main circuit board and the function board of sensors, touch panels, and near-field communication for simplifying the controlling systems; and AI-enabled sensing systems with independent clock signals in the AI-processing board and the sensing board for streamlining the wiring design.