A Plug&Play Architecture for Low-Power Measurement Systems

This paper describes a measurement system architecture designed to be employed in the presence of hard power-supply constraints. The architecture is based on a system controller and on a set of measurement modules connected through a multi-drop bus. The power requirements are fulfilled by means of a power management strategy so that modules are powered sequentially. The modules are composed of a measuring device, either custom-made or commercial, and of a control interface specifically designed to implement hot-swap and plus&play features. In this way, modules can be added to the measurement system also during a measurement session. The paper also describes an example of temperature measurement system based on the proposed architecture