Advanced Data Acquisition Systems

Current and future requirements of the aerospace sensors and transducers field make it necessary for the design and development of new data acquisition devices and instrumentation systems. New designs are sought to incorporate selfhealth, self-calibrating, self-repair capabilities, allowing greater measurement reliability and extended calibration cycles. With the addition of power management schemes, state-of-the-art data acquisition systems allow data to be processed and presented to the users with increased efficiency and accuracy. The design architecture presented in this paper displays an innovative approach to data acquisition systems. The design incorporates: electronic health self-check, device/system selfcalibration, electronics and function selfrepair, failure detection and prediction, and power management (reduced power consumption). These requirements are driven by the aerospace industry need to reduce operations and maintenance costs, to accelerate processing time and to provide reliable hardware with minimum costs.