New Industry Products

Power-One Debuts ZM7300 Digital Power Managers

November 16, 2005 by Jeff Shepard

Power-One Inc. (Camarillo, CA) debuted its new ZM7300 Series digital power manager controllers that can manage analog components, including voltage regulator modules, linear regulators, point-of-load (POL) converters, fans, and others, while simultaneously managing digital POL converters for a total of up to 32 devices. The open-architecture, Z-Alliance™-compatible products can communicate with host systems via industry-standard I2C interfaces, to support 100 kbs and 400 kbs modes of operation.

The new ZM7300 controllers are available in industry-standard 9 mm x 9 mm QFN packages that are less than one-sixth the size of Power-One's previous generation of digital power managers. In addition to purchasing ZM7300 controllers pre-programmed to their exact requirements, customers can perform programming via an IEEE 1149.1-compliant JTAG port during board assembly, or by using the wizard-driven Z-Series graphical user interface and the I2C port. Monitoring capabilities include output voltage, current, and temperature for each Z-Series converter. A buffer stores this information for host-system communications, facilitating system-level monitoring and remote diagnostics. The Z-Series controllers can also monitor the intermediate voltage bus, accept external interrupts, and initiate crowbar protection.

Unit pricing for an eight-node ZM7300 model controller is approximately $8.50 for 1,000-piece quantities. Production quantities of the RoHS-compliant ZM7300 models, ranging from 4 nodes to 32 nodes, will be available in the first quarter of 2006.