LM87

National Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) recently introduced the LM87. The device remotely and internally monitors temperature, senses supply voltages and controls fan speed in PCs, servers and workstations. According to National, the LM87 combines features from the LM81 and LM84, including eight positive voltage inputs for an eight-channel ADC to directly monitor power supplies, two fan-speed monitoring inputs, two-channel remote diode temperature sensing, on-chip temperature sensing and an eight-bit DAC to control fan speeds. The device also features a chassis intrusion detector and compatibility with SMBus and I2C serial interfaces, and VID/IRQ monitoring inputs for different CPU power supplies. The need to include system hardware monitoring on the motherboard has become extremely critical for manufacturers supplying corporate desktop PCs, servers and workstations, said Zaryab Hamavand, product marketing manager for National. The LM87 is a highly integrated data acquisition system for hardware monitoring of virtually any microprocessor-based system. Its main advantage is that it takes all of the key analog and digital functions and monitors them with respect to system limits. In quantities of 1,000, pricing for the chip is $2.80 each.