Date: 08/05/2012

Star topology power management by Lattice with up to 36 power supply rails

Lattice Semiconductor Corporation has announced a scalable, in-system upgradable, star topology power management architecture that can be used across a wide range of circuit boards requiring more than 12 power supply rails. Lattice has simultaneously made available two new application notes for its Platform Manager devices that enable customers to adopt the new architecture.

"The number of power supply rails in a circuit board has been steadily increasing," said Shakeel Peera, director of strategic marketing for Lattice Semiconductor. "These new application notes help expedite implementation of a centralized, scalable and flexible power management algorithm within a single Platform Manager device."

Power management functions include supply sequencing, monitoring, hot-swap control, reset and other supervisory signal generation. The complexity of power management functions grows significantly when the number of circuit board power supplies increases. The solution often demands the use of multiple power management devices. As a result, designers need to partition the overall power management task and implement it using distributed algorithms in multiple devices. The inadequacies of this approach become apparent only during the board debug stage, forcing board re-spin and costly project delays. The integrated power management approach is made possible by the Platform Manager devices.

The application notes describe unrestricted access to power supply status indicators and the ability to control all board management functions.

AN6089: Describes how the Platform Manager device can be used as a centralized controller to implement flexible sequencing and precision monitoring of up to 36 power supply rails on a circuit board.

AN6088: Describes how to enable field updates to the power management algorithm with a fail-safe sequencing backup that restores board operation if the field update procedure is interrupted.