Power Management System Supervisor, Monitor and Control Power System Management

Digital Power System Management

Large multi-rail systems, like those that employ ASICs or FPGAs, call for multiple supplies that need to be easily managed. Users need to be able to easily adjust supply voltages, while reading parameters like voltage, current or temperature via an accessible interface. Controlling the power system digitally provides more opportunity to build-in more precise protection, diagnostic and monitoring mechanisms that are otherwise more difficult and costly to implement in a purely analog power supply system. Users can harness the powerful LTpowerPlay GUI to easily configure and interrogate any Linear Technology PMBus digital power management IC’s user setting and fault log. This provides rapid troubleshooting and debug capabilities during all stages of the product life cycle - design, development, production and failure analysis. Once configured, these devices provide the essential power system management functions without host intervention and do not ever require writing a single line of code.

Linear Technology's family of digital power supply management ICs are highly integrated solutions that offer essential functions, including power supply monitoring, supervision, margining and sequencing, and feature EEPROM for storing user configurations and fault logging. The portfolio offers devices that can monitor and control any supply voltage with up to 0.25% accuracy, and manage current and temperature with equally impressive performance. Regardless of which device, each channel is fully functional, with dedicated supervisors for fast response times to undervoltage or overvoltage faults. If a fault should occur, the black box recorder automatically stores all parametric information at the time of fault, which can be especially valuable in diagnosing field failures or brown-out situations. All Linear Technology digital power supply managers work with any power supply that has a RUN and TRIM pin, giving users the freedom to choose their own supplies and making it convenient to upgrade existing systems. All Linear Technology digital power supply management ICs can also be easily cascaded through a simple share bus, and mixed-and-matched in a system for maximum flexibility, all managed easily in one LTpowerPlay window.

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