SLAAED9 November 2023 TAA5412-Q1 , TAC5311-Q1 , TAC5312-Q1 , TAC5411-Q1 , TAC5412-Q1
Typical automotive audio applications favor the use of electret condenser microphones (ECM) for ease of mounting, interfacing, pickup directionality, moisture, and dust protection. These ECM microphones operate between 2 V to 10 V and can have large voltage swings. For accurate fault detection the ADC is required to interface directly with the microphone pins. For an AC-coupled application, designs require doubling the number of input pins as shown in Figure 2-1.
This configuration also requires that the inputs use high-voltage transistors to handle the 10-VRMS swing directly. Together, these two factors lead to a very large solution size. Because of the doubling of input pin and added transistors, the TAx5xxx-Q1 family uses DC coupling for fault diagnostics with an attenuator on the front end of the signal chain to allow the input and the diagnostics to operate using a single pin. This design is shown in Figure 2-2.
AC coupling has benefits as well, such as higher input swing and more filtering flexibility. For applications that desire AC coupling with fault diagnostics, using a channel for AC-coupled analog inputs and dedicating the other channel to the DC-coupled diagnostics is possible. Figure 2-3 shows an example of channel 1 with AC-coupled microphone inputs and channel 2 is being used for microphone diagnostics. In this configuration, faults on channels 1 are recorded in the diagnostic registers for channel 2. Enabling the primary ADC for channel 2 is not necessary and is used only for diagnostics.
Figure 2-3 depicts a TAx5xxx diagnostic monitoring architecture for a fault monitoring signal chain.
All of the input pins are monitored (4 pins for the 2-channel devices) along with the MICBIAS pin voltage, MICBIAS load current, VBAT_IN input, and internal die temperature. The input pins first pass through an attenuator, which scales the signal down by a factor of 17 before reaching the scanning multiplexer (MUX). The MUX automatically scans all inputs where diagnostics are enabled in a consecutive manner. The scan rate is adjustable in the DIAG_CFG3 register (Page 1, address 0x49). Once an input is selected by the scanning MUX, eight consecutive samples of the input are collected and averaged to improve the noise performance. Note that disabling the diagnostics for a channel is independent of disabling the channel, and diagnostics can still be read on inactive channels.