LDOs power high-performance Bluetooth designs

Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) has turned to Torex Semiconductor to provide effective power management for two of its example Bluetooth designs.

Cambridge Silicon Radio (CSR) has turned to Torex Semiconductor to provide effective power management for two of its example Bluetooth designs.

One of the designs provides Bluetooth capability for a PC, the other for a mobile phone headset.

Based on CSR's state-of-the-art BlueCore2, the example designs are aimed at giving designers the means to quickly understand Bluetooth technology and how to use it in their own designs.

The Torex parts chosen are the XC6204 and XC6209, two new high-performance LDO voltage regulators.

Luke D'Arcy, CSR's Product Manager commented: "Torex's XC6204 is not only very fast with a highly accurate voltage output down to 1.8V at +/-2%, it also allows the use of a small ceramic output capacitor making our Bluetooth enabled PC solution smaller, thus reducing cost.

For the headset example design we needed both high performance and, critically, significantly lower power consumption.

In the XC6209 we found a device that provided a low quiescent current of typically 25uA, and yet could still give us the high speed and high performance we needed".

Added Gareth Henson, Torex Semiconductor Europe's Managing Director: "Our new voltage regulators are right at the cutting edge of technology for hand held communications applications such as Bluetooth, a claim borne out by CSR's decision to use two of them in their Bluetooth example designs.

In the XC6204 we have a fully specified device capable of delivering the highest levels of performance.

The XC6209 maintains these very high levels of performance but also offers extremely low power consumption which is needed on the Bluetooth headset specification.

Both the XC6204 and XC6209 are also available in a chip scale USP-6B package option which is ideally suited to headset applications as it only measures 1.8 x 2.0 x 0.65mm".

The XC6204 and XC6209's output voltage ratings are 0.9 to 6.0V, selectable in 50mV increments.

Both devices have a low drop out voltage of 200mV at 100mA and a high ripple rejection of 70dB (at 10kHz).

They are fully stable with low ESR ceramic output capacitors bringing significant cost savings over competitive devices which require more expensive tantalum capacitors to maintain stability.

Torex LDOs are able to maintain their stability even during load fluctuations due to their extremely fast load and transient response.

The voltage regulators' CE function enables the output to be turned off thereby further reducing power consumption to less than 0.1uA.

Both the XC6204 and XC6209 operate over a wide -40 to +85C temperature range and are available in a compact SOT-25 package or an ultra-compact chip scale USP-6B package.

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