A peak current detector is integrated into a power supply, such as a power management integrated circuit, to detect glitch attacks imposed on the power rails inside the power supply. Integrated circuitry being supplied by the power supply periodically checks the state of the power supply via a secure communication channel to obtain the detected peak current values, which allow the integrated circuitry to detect those attacks and react accordingly to any possible threats.

A current measurement circuit may use a probabilistic technique to determine a current from a circuit block. In one embodiment, the circuit includes a comparator circuit, a first current sensing element (such as a first resistor), and a control circuit. The first current sensing element is coupled to the comparator circuit to establish a first comparator input signal representative of the current at an input of the comparator circuit. The control circuit is coupled to the comparator circuit to obtain a first plurality of comparator output decisions corresponding to the first current sensing element for a specified count, determine a first proportion of comparator output decisions meeting a specified criterion, and determine a voltage value of the first comparator input signal from the first proportion. The control circuit is configured to determine a current value using the voltage value of the first comparator input signal and an impedance value of the first current sensing element. The current measurement circuit is relatively low-cost and easy to implement, without requiring a precision reference voltage, current, and/or high-cost analog-to-digital converters (ADCs).

A data recovery method framework is described, in which the data is classified as either ambient or disturbance data, and recovered by different methods to achieve good performance efficiently. An approach based on decision tree is described for identifying ambient and disturbance data. Then, an improved cubic spline interpolation based on the priority allocation strategy is described for ambient data loss, which can quickly and accurately recover ambient data. Simultaneously, a disturbance data recovery method based on singular value decomposition is described. It can achieve disturbance data recovery accurately by a single channel of measurement.

Integrated circuitry, such as a microcontroller, for controlling an electric motor includes circuitry for measuring a bi-directional current flowing within a coil of the electric motor. The current is sensed by an externally implemented current sensing element, such as a shunt resistor, to produce a differential voltage that is delivered to input pins of the microcontroller, which are protected by electrostatic discharge protection circuits. Current sources implemented within the microcontroller are coupled to the input pins, and work in concert with external resistors to shift the differential voltage so that it is maintained within an appropriate voltage operating range so that an accurate measurement of the bi-directional current can be made by the microcontroller.

A method for estimating a property of a signal (1) sensed in an electrical system, comprises the steps of sensing the signal (1) and estimating a fundamental period of a fundamental of the signal (1) by comparing the sensed signal (1) with at least one threshold (2) to detect threshold crossings and estimating the fundamental period from the threshold crossings. The signal property is then estimated from the fundamental period and/or from the sensed signal (1) during an interval of a length of the fundamental period. An electronic device according to the invention comprises a micro controller and/or an analogue circuitry which performs the method for estimating a property of a signal. Preferably, the micro controller and/or analogue circuitry controls other parts of the electronic device depending on the results obtained by the method for estimating a property of a signal.

A measuring circuit for registering and processing signals received from a transducer having a plurality of transducer elements includes a first signal input, a second signal input and a third signal input. The first signal input is configured to receive a first signal from a first transducer element. The second signal input is configured to receive a first signal from a second transducer element. The third signal input is configured to receive a second signal sum indicative of a sum of a second signal from each of the plurality of transducer elements, each of the second signals being an inverse of a corresponding first signal. A processor is electrically coupled to the three signal inputs and is configured to register each of the first signals individually; register the second sum signal; and generate a differential signal based on the first and second signals.

A device may receive audio data based on a capturing of sounds associated with a structure. The device may obtain a model associated with the structure. The model may have been trained to receive the audio data as input, determine a score that identifies a likelihood that a sound is present in the audio data, and identify the sound based on the score. The device may determine at least one parameter associated with the sound. The device may generate a metric based on the at least one parameter associated with the sound, and perform an action based on the metric.

A readout circuit for use with a Wheatstone bridge sensor. At least some of the example embodiments are methods including: driving an excitation signal in parallel through a first set of sensor elements of a Wheatstone bridge sensor and refraining from driving the excitation signal through a second set of sensor elements of the Wheatstone bridge sensor; measuring response of the first set of sensor elements, the measuring response of the first set of sensor elements creates a first measurement; and then driving the excitation signal in parallel through the second set of sensor elements of the Wheatstone bridge and refraining from driving the excitation signal through the first set of sensor elements; and measuring response of the second set of sensor elements, the measuring response of the second set of sensor elements creates a second measurement.

According to certain aspects, a predictive tracking scheme is provided for sampling inductor currents in a digital PWM controller used for high-bandwidth voltage regulation. In one or more embodiments, the predicted current derived from the PWM waveform is fed forward to the current sense ADC in order to reduce the required conversion range. These and other embodiments only need to convert a few of the LSB of the ADC in order to correct the largest error expected in the synthesizer.

A partial discharge (PD) detection system includes a PD sensor configured to sense a PD event of an electrical system and to generate a sensor signal in response to the PD event. An envelope generator is coupled to receive the sensor signal from the PD sensor. The envelope generator extracts an envelope signal from the sensor signal. A digitizer is configured to convert the envelope signal to a digital representation of the PD event.