Six-channel power chips boast up to 95% efficiency

Power management integrated circuits are designed for single-cell, lithium-powered portable electronics.

Texas Instruments has introduced a family of six-channel power management integrated circuits (PMICs) for single-cell, lithium-powered portable electronics.

Combining high-performance power building blocks in a single 4 x 4mm package, the easy-to-design devices support power system requirements of advanced application processors used in smart phones, portable media players, navigation systems and other electronics.

TI's TPS65050 family of convertors efficiently manages power in today's leading applications processors, such as TI's OMAP processors, TMS320C55x generation of digital signal processors (DSPs) and others.

The six-channel devices maximise up to 95% efficiency across a wide range of point-of-load currents up to 1A.

The TPS65050 integrates two 2.25MHz step-down convertors to support the system's core, peripheral, I/O or memory voltages.

Both of the convertors, which operate at input voltages from 2.5 to 6V, allow the device to operate in a power-save mode at light-load currents, and can be placed in a shutdown mode when power consumption is reduced to less than 1uA.

The TPS65050 also integrates two general-purpose, 400mA linear dropout (LDO) voltage regulators and two 200mA LDOs that can be enabled with an external input pin for each LDO.

In addition, the LDOs support an input voltage between 1.5 and 6.5V, which allows each to be supplied from one of the integrated step-down convertors or directly from the battery.

The TPS65050 family of convertors is available in volume production from TI and its authorised distributors.

The devices come in a 32-pin, 4 x 4mm, leadless QFN package.

The TPS65050's 2.25MHz frequency also allows a designer to implement a tiny 2.2uH inductor and ultra-small capacitors to achieve a small solution size.

Suggested retail pricing starts at US $2.75 in 1000-unit quantities.

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