The MAXQ3181 is a dedicated electricity measurement front-end that collects and calculates polyphase voltage, current, active power and energy, and many other metering parameters of a polyphase load. The computed results can be retrieved by an external master through the on-chip serial peripheral interface (SPI?) bus. This bus is also used by the external master to configure the operation of the MAXQ3181 and monitor the status of operations.

The MAXQ3181 performs voltage and current measurements using an integrated ADC that can measure up to seven external differential signal pairs. An eighth differential signal pair is used to measure the die temperature. An internal amplifier automatically adjusts the current channel gain to compensate for low-current channel-signal levels.