Post a Comment
News and New Products
Power-management IC integrates seven programmable regulators
By Paul Rako, Technical Editor -- EDN, 6/10/2008
Summit Microelectronics’ new SMB119 power-management IC provides all the power rails needed for a modern handheld product. The part integrates three synchronous buck regulators, two boost converters, one configurable buck-boost converter, and one low-dropout linear regulator. Input voltage is 2.7 to 6V. The device can operate at 95% efficiency and has a standby current of 0.1 μA. The switching regulators have a PWM (pulse-width-modulation)-override mode to reduce EMI (electromagnetic interference). The IC also provides power supervision to monitor overvoltage or undervoltage conditions. It communicates with the system processor over a SMB (system-management bus) or and I2C (interintegrated-circuit) bus. The SMB119 targets applications in portable consumer electronics, such as digital still cameras, digital camcorders, MP3 and MPEG-4 portable media players, GPS (global-positioning-system) terminals, portable medical equipment, personal digital assistants, and the next generation of mobile smartphones.
The evaluation board works through a USB port with Summit’s Windows-based GUI (graphical user interface) that allows designers to set up regulators and supervision parameters and then program them into nonvolatile memory. Once designers define the part’s functions, they can extract a hex file from the evaluation board that will allow Summit to provide the part in volume quantities. You can download the design-kit software from Summit’s Web site.
The part comes in 0 to 70°C or −40 to +85°C operating range and comes in a 7×7-mm, 48-pad QFN package with a suggested retail price of $3.74 (10,000). Samples and evaluation modules are available. Volume production has just begun. An available reference design incorporates the SMB119 along with a SMB137 switch-mode charger.
