Date: 09/12/2020

Highly programmable PMICs serve broad range of applications

New power management IC family from Qorvo offers five voltage rails, sequencer and 7 configurable general-purpose input/outputs. The GPIOs can be configured for functions such as interrupt, pushbutton, power recycle, sleep/ deep sleep modes, VID, DVS, regulator on/off, external PG, external enable and reset. Other configurable options include start-up time, slew rate, system level sequencing, switching frequency, sleep mode and operating modes. There is also proprietary ACOT control mode which basically gives best performance at low output voltage.

Each of the ICs feature two LDOs along with three DC-DC buck converters with integrated power FETs, which can be configured through I2C bus interface.

ACT88327/8/9/1 Constant-On-Time (COT) PMIC family can be used for different end product by altering the PMIC configuration without any special software. Suitable for applications such as SSD cards, CCTV security cameras, routers, low-power mobile users, home control and voice assisted devices. ACT88329 can offer output voltage as low as 0.5 V for applications involving LPDDR5.

The various configurations and features available include:

Buck1 and LDO1 can be configured as a load switch
Buck1 is a peak current mode, fixed frequency DC-DC step down converter that is optimized for output voltage closest to the input voltage
Buck1 switches at either 1.125 MHz or 2.25 MHz, requiring only three small components for operation
Buck2 and Buck3 use an asynchronous constant on-time, ACOT, control architecture to optimize the load transient response with smaller output capacitors
All Bucks work with 0.47uH inductor and require only three small components for operation
LDO1 can support up to 390mA and 1A current in bypass mode
Both LDOs require only small ceramic capacitors

David Briggs, senior director of Qorvo's Programmable Power Management business, said, "Qorvo continues to push the limits of integration and configurability in small form-factor PMICs with multi-time programmability. This enables our customers to bring new products to market faster by shortening design cycle time."