The secret of digital power chip integrated circuit board

As engineers become familiar with the technology and advantages of digital power supply, a growing number of digital power sources are gaining momentum. Power systems and power designers have realized that the deployment of digital power is not a new design to revolutionize the existing technology. Due to the current market of digital power supply devices of various kinds, the designer can immediately take advantage of its great advantage, application of any design project. You can get very valuable and very rich returns here.

Overview of digital power supply size and cost

Development and evolution of digital power supply using mixed signal processing.  Mixed signal processing can meet the needs of digital circuits and analog circuits.  There are a wide range of digital circuits, including microprocessors, state machines, communication peripherals, and simple logic circuits. Memory is also included in this section. Analog circuits can include operational amplifiers and comparators, analog to digital converter (ADC), digital to analog converter (DAC), pulse width modulator (PWM) generator and reference, and more other devices.  The full use of this processing technology allows these devices to optimize the allocation of analog and digital circuits, while also integrating these devices on a single chip. By reducing the cost of the bill of material (BOM) and the number of devices, the cost of the system can be reduced, and the system will be more reliable due to the reduction of the interconnection components contained in the system. Since a controller is likely to serve many solutions, manufacturers need to track and reserve minimal inventory units (SKU) less.

For example, the integration of a multipurpose microcontroller (MCU) not only performs a range of power related functions, but also eliminates the need for other independent control chips. Many power management features such as overvoltage, undervoltage, overcurrent conditions, and other functions can be set up for integrated MCU. According to the different processing capabilities of digital MCU, digital power devices can be set to include a variety of power conversion characteristics, such as simple to complex topology support, adaptive loop compensation, peak current mode control for slope compensation, current sharing and temperature compensation. Another example is to provide power factor correction (PFC), while the implementation of electronic meter metering function.  By providing a variety of digital power devices, designers can select the most appropriate functions for applications without worrying about the burden of other useless functions.

Power topology flexibility

The inherent flexibility of digital technology makes digital power devices that are unique to integrated digital MCU or configurable state machines become a platform that supports all major traditional power topologies, and this platform also supports any possible new and more sophisticated topologies. The supporting topologies include phase shifted full bridge, polyphase interleaved PFC, non bridge PFC, resonant LLC, bidirectional DC DC power supply module, bidirectional AC DC power module and PFC, three-phase inverter, maximum power point tracking (MPPT) DC/DC and other topologies. Because of this flexibility and integrated peripherals, digital power supplies can provide precise waveform control by using high resolution phase, frequency and duty cycle control algorithms.

efficiency

The advanced control algorithm enables digital power devices to improve the power and system performance, thereby reducing the power and power consumption of the host system. This has a significant impact on the operating costs of many applications, such as data centers and mass storage systems.  Adaptive digital control can achieve rapid regulation to change the line and load conditions, thereby optimizing the power supply and system efficiency. For example, for more efficient power transmission, the power level control method can be changed in real time, or the power conversion can be adjusted to reduce the power consumption under light load or no load condition.

Reliability and safety

Digital power devices can easily interact with other digital and analog components in the system, which means that they can effectively improve the reliability and security of the host system by performing system level monitoring and fault response. In fact, the programmable attributes of digital controllers enable them to support multiprotocol communications over multiple buses (such as PMBus, I2C, SCI, SPI, CAN, and other types of buses), so that the system can easily communicate with the power subsystem. By monitoring and recording the data in the whole system, digital power technology helps to diagnose the system, provide early fault and false alarm, and the system can take appropriate operation.

Wide band gap (WBG) compatibility

Instead of waiting for new analog controllers that can meet the new functionality of WBG devices, it's better to use some digital power solutions now. In providing high resolution timing control at the same time, has the capacity to support all digital power supply topology, such as gallium nitride (GaN) of the new devices can be used with high switching frequency, low loss, high switching topology more power density and zero reverse recovery in.

Digital power innovation of TI

TI (TI) digital power technology products portfolio is the industry's most comprehensive product library. Although other vendors may be able to provide professional digital power solutions for one or several segments of the industry, TI's broad digital power innovation portfolio can meet any possible design requirements.