Silicon Labs has a diverse set of chips on offer and I’m really taken by the video demo of its new Si1120 Touchless Slider evaluation kit. The QuickSense Si1120 is an active infrared proximity sensor that you can use to build a variety of products with innovative, ultra-low power, touchless human interfaces. The chip itself incorporates an infrared LED driver, an infrared photodiode, an ambient light sensor, and control logic. The high-sensitivity infrared photodiode provides a single-pulse infrared proximity measurement allowing you to implement user interfaces using infrared light emitting diodes operating at unusually low power levels. The device is packaged in a tiny 3×3 mm clear surface-mount package and when it’s combined with a Silicon Labs low-power microcontroller, the Si1120 can be used for advanced motion and gesture recognition in products such as:
- Touch screens
- Instrumentation panels
- Kiosks
- Gaming systems
- Industrial interface
- Security
- Smoke detectors
- Residential HVAC
- Home appliances
- Toys
- Keyboards
- Fax/printer/scanner front panels
All this is just words. A video speaks volumes. So here’s the video:
The demonstration shows a user-interface slider board that incorporates an Si1120, two infrared LEDs, and eight visible LEDs. This board is controlled by Silicon Labs new ultra-low power C8051F900 microcontroller, which consumes as little as 160 μA/MHz in active mode and 10 nA in sleep mode with full memory retention. It will run on supply voltages as low as 0.9V. The microcontroller is based on an 8-bit, 25-MIPS 8051 controller core with a slew of peripheral devices including four timers, a UART, and a 12-bit A/D converter with a 15-channel analog multiplexer. The microcontroller is available with either 8 or 16 kbytes of on-chip flash and has 768 bytes of on-chip RAM.
Perhaps just as important, Silicon Labs supports this unique demonstration board with its QuickSense Studio development environment, a graphical environment wrapping multiple applications that guide user-interface developers through a development flow that includes graphical configuration wizards, firmware templates and performance monitoring tools. These programs interface with Silicon Labs’ QuickSense firmware API, which is a configurable firmware library that supports the development of many different interface types, from simple buttons to full gesture recognition. After configuring a project using the QuickSense Studio Configuration Wizard, the software simplifies the integration of human interface generates all the C code required for the selected functions.
I still find it hard to believe that a small 3×3 mm package can do all of this, but seeing is believing and the video makes a believer out of me. I’ve long been a user-interface enthusiast and the Silicon Labs Si1120 evaluation kit and demo board is simply one of the snazziest new user-interface components I’ve seen in quite a while. We’ve been watching lead characters use gestures to control sophisticated equipment for decades in science fiction movies and TV shows—most memorably perhaps in 2002’s Minority Report. Gesture interfaces, when combined with graphical displays are some of the most intuitive and most usable interfaces for all sorts of high-tech products and the Silicon Labs Si1120 looks to be one truly inexpensive way to implement a user interface that appears pretty darn sophisticated to an end user. Sophisticated user interfaces entice consumers to buy, so be sure to check out the new way to interact with your product. It’s clearly worth a few minutes of consideration.
