At Pittcon 2015 (New Orleans, LA), Texas Instruments (TI; Dallas, TX; NASDAQ: TXN) announced the expansion of its near-infrared (NIR) sensing chipset portfolio with a fully programmable micro-electromechanical-systems (MEMS) chipset intended for ultramobile spectroscopic analysis over a 700 to 2500 nm wavelength range. The chipset is designed for a variety of handheld NIR sensing application areas such as spectrometers and chemical analyzers; application areas include farming, food and drink, petrochemical, health, and skin-care industries.
The DLP chipset consists of the DLP2010NIR 2D digital micromirror device (DMD) and the DLPA2005 integrated power management and DLPC150 controller. The DMD itself has 17-degree-tilt 5.4 μm pixels in a 854 x 480 micromirror array. The chipset can be paired with the Bluetooth low energy-enabled DLP NIRscan Nano evaluation module (EVM) to allow prototyping of portable analyzers for ultramobile spectrometers.
The Nano EVM has a high-resolution wavelength range of 900 to 1700 nm in a 90 cm3 volume and has both Bluetooth and Bluetooth low energy functionality, allowing Andriod and iOS development. Its associated processor has an ARM Cortex-M4 CPU, 1 MB flash, 256 KB RAM, 10 I2Cs, eight UARTS, four QSPIs, USB 2.0 and other connections. The EVM has a battery that can be charged via USB.
TI maintains what it calls the DLP Design Network to support its hardware and software integration, optics design, system integration, prototyping, manufacturing services, and so on; the purpose is to boost end-product development.
The DLP2010NIR and DLPC150 will be available in April 2015 and the DLP NIRscan Nano EVM will be available in spring 2015.
For more info, see http://www.ti.com/DLPNIR.
A video on the chipset can be seen here: http://www.ti.com/general/docs/video/watch.tsp?entryid=4078744563001&DCMP=MobileSpectroscopy&HQS=dlp-embed-alc-mobilespect-15q1-pr-v-en