SAN FRANCISCO — At least a dozen sensor makers have thrown their support behind a proposed IEEE standard that describes an analog interface for smart sensors.

The companies — with products like temperature, pressure, flow, displacement and other industrial measurement devices — agreed to support the Plug & Play Sensors Program of National Instruments Corp., which is trying to build support for the not-yet-ratified IEEE P1451.4. If adopted, the standard would pave the way for widespread deployment of smart sensors.

Under the 1451.4 standard, systems integrators and developers could automatically configure measurement and automation systems for analog sensors, simplifying the way data acquisition systems are set up, configured and maintained, said David Potter, who manages National Instruments' measurement platforms group. Potter is also co-chair of the IEEE 1451.4 working group.

The 1451.4 spec proposes that sensors include an embedded, low-cost memory chip containing standardized transducer electronic data sheets (Teds) that store sensor information and parameters for self-identification and self-description. The sheets eliminate the need for manual input.

National Instruments (Austin, Texas) announced the latest backers for 1451.4 at last month's Sensors Expo Conference in Boston.

Hoping to smooth the transition, the company also announced development tools. The Teds Library for LabView implements basic Teds management functions into LabView apps and can read and write Teds information from them. The company also created the Sensors Development Kit as "one of the ways of supporting legacy devices in the smart sensors program," Potter said.

Sensor vendors who joined National's Plug & Play Sensors Program are Celesco, Endevco, Kistler, Lebow, Macro Sensors, Measurement Specialties, PCB Piezotronics, Sensotec, Transducer Techniques, Watlow, Weed Instrument and Wilcoxon.

The goal of the IEEE smart sensors program is to make transducers function like plug-and-play devices on a network with measurement instruments, industrial controls and other data-acquisition systems.

In principle, a sensor should be able to tell a host the kind of measurements it can make, its range, accuracy, linearization and signal conditioning requirements. Each sensor thus becomes an entire electronic system — complete with transducer, amplifier, analog-to-digital converter, microprocessor and lookup table.