Power chip cuts core consumption

The industry's first digitally controlled PowerWise energy management unit reduces the power consumption of digital processors used in battery-powered handheld consumer products.

National Semiconductor has developed the industry's first digitally controlled PowerWise energy management unit (EMU), a highly integrated circuit that reduces the power consumption of digital processors used in battery-powered handheld consumer products.

The LP5550 EMU, used in conjunction with National's advanced power controller (APC) and intelligent energy manager (IEM) technology from ARM, reduces the power consumption of digital processor cores by up to 70%.

The LP5550 and APC also support the PowerWise Interface (PWI) open-industry standard introduced by National Semiconductor and ARM.

National's LP5550 enables a digital processor to adaptively adjust its supply voltage to the minimum level needed, greatly reducing its power consumption.

The LP5550 includes an adaptive-supply-voltage buck regulator for the processor core and three additional fixed-voltage regulators.

The fixed-voltage regulators power the input/output ring, oscillator/phase-locked loops (PLL) and memory on a low-power system-on-chip (SoC).

The PWI interface controls the LP5550's functions for simple interfacing to the digital processor.

"National Semiconductor's LP5550 redefines the industry standard for power conversion efficiency", said Robert Fischer, Product Marketing Manager Power Management Group at National Semiconductor in Europe.

"This allows designers to operate multiple power supplies in parallel, Semiconductor.

"Using sophisticated digital power management control, the LP5550 maximises both system and power conversion efficiency".

"This energy savings allows handheld device manufacturers to provide new features such as video and 3D gaming while maintaining long battery life".

The LP5550 supports the PWI interface, a 2-pin, high-speed serial power management control interface for advanced processor power management.

To enable adaptive voltage scaling, the LP5550 includes a digitally controlled, 300mA, 0.6 to 1.2V buck regulator with up to 90% efficiency.

In addition, it has three programmable low dropout (LDO) regulators with output voltages ranging from 0.6 to 3.3V.

One LDO supports 100mA and the other two support 250mA.

Packaged in a small-footprint, lead-free, 16-pin LLP package, the LP5550 has excellent package thermal characteristics and operates over the full temperature range from -40 to +85C, with input voltages from 3.0 to 5.5V.

The LP5550 is available now and is priced at $4.50 in 1000-unit quantities.

Lead-free package options are also available.

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