Analog Devices introduced a digital potentiometer (digiPot) family with the industry’s best resistor tolerance, allowing designers of industrial and instrumentation equipment to meet tighter resistor matching requirements for improved system accuracy. In industrial control systems, medical instrumentation, and other devices that require finely tuned gain and offset control, power supply calibration or volume control, the tighter resistor matching provided by the new digiPots allows engineers to set the range with greater accuracy, resulting in more precise system controls.
Designed for open-loop applications and systems that demand precision calibration and tolerance matching, the AD529x family consists of three single-channel, 10-bit programmable digiPots featuring less than one percent end-to-end resistor tolerance (RTol) error over a wide ±15-V supply range—20 times better than competing digiPots, which specify a minimum RTol error of 20 percent. The best-in-class resistor matching of the AD529x family allow users to take full advantage of up to 1024 tap adjustments to more precisely adjust and trim electronic circuits for improved overall system performance.
The AD529x family is manufactured on Analog Devices iCMOS® (industrial CMOS) modular manufacturing process, which combines high-voltage CMOS and bipolar technologies to enable the device to support dual power supplies in the ±10.5-V to ±15-V range and single supply operation in the 21-V to 30-V range. The 1024-tap AD5292 and pin-compatible, 256-tap AD5291 digiPot feature a 20-times-programmable memory. The wiper setting of these two devices is controlled through an SPI (serial peripheral interface)-compatible port. An internal fuse is blown to permanently save the wiper position. Triggered by a simple software command, no external power supply is required to program the device, saving cost and PCB area. The 1024-tap AD5293 digiPot also features less then one percent resistor tolerance (RTol) error and wide supply range but with volatile memory.
