New Industry Products

Potentia Debuts PS-2606 Digital Power Management Controller

August 03, 2005 by Jeff Shepard

Potentia Semiconductor Corp. (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada) debuted its new PS-2606 power system controller, which provides a complete power management solution for up to six non-isolated dc-dc converters and one intermediate bus in telecom, networking, and data-storage applications. The integrated chip enables users to digitally program output voltages, interlocked sequencing for startup and shutdown, and over-voltage and under-voltage warning and fault thresholds on each power rail.

Using the PowerCenter Designer software, the controller is simple to configure for complex power system applications. Designs incorporating any type of dc-dc converter, including standard POLA and DOSA modules, can be validated using the PowerCenter Emulation Platform. All secondary-side power system data managed by the PS-2606 is accessible to system-level processors through the I2C interface. In addition, via its integral PI-Link isolated communications interface, the controller can also provide voltage, fuse status, and fault data from Potentia's PS-1000 Series primary-side, power-management ICs. For higher rail-count power systems, multiple controllers can be cascaded.

A separate input for monitoring the intermediate bus voltage provides the means to determine whether the bus is suitable for startup sequencing, and can be fully integrated into the system's warning and fault diagnostics. The controller can also be configured to automatically retry power sequencing after responding to a fault condition. The PS-2606's four general-purpose I/O pins can be allocated to any of the six monitored power rails as either hardware enable inputs, or three power-good outputs and one power-bad output, and can also be configured as an interrupt for over-voltage/under-voltage warnings, primary-side fault indication, or primary-side shutdown.

The PS-2606 power system controller is priced at $6.00 each in 10,000-piece quantities.