In all electronic devices and products, there is no shortage of power management IC "figure". With the rapid development of digital high-speed IC technology and chip manufacturing technology, the role of high-performance power IC "support" becomes more and more important. The ever-changing application of electronic products, the rise of environmental protection and energy saving demand also put forward higher requirements for power ics, giving birth to a new generation of highly integrated, high-performance and energy-efficient power management IC demand, has also become the eternal mission of power management IC manufacturers.




According to Unionpay Bao Electronics market research is expected that in 2018, the power management IC market is expected to reach 45 billion US dollars, consumer electronics, network communications, mobile Internet fields are the main application markets, automotive electronics, new energy fields are also gradually. Under the role of application drivers and technological advances, the technical requirements for power ics are also rising. And with the continuous innovation of applications, the power supply IC market also shows diversification of demand, application segmentation, more high-performance power supply IC market demand is also deepening and expanding, better to meet the system innovation, performance improvement and service.
On the one hand, with the continuous upgrading of semiconductor process technology, the chips and components on the PCB board have higher functions, faster running speed, and smaller size, which drives the power management IC to provide lower and more accurate nuclear power voltage and larger supply current, more stringent voltage feedback accuracy, and higher efficiency performance. On the other hand, the power management IC application field continues to expand and deepen, to achieve better control functions, more intelligent control loop, faster dynamic response characteristics, more simplified peripheral layout design and so on are "indispensable". If the power management IC wants to "take it", it needs to face these problems.


Zou Qin, Marketing Director of the Power Business Unit, said that in order to help customers solve these challenges and simplify design, digital, modular, intelligent power ics are an inevitable trend.
For example, she said that for FPGA customers, power management has increasingly become a strategic competitive advantage, especially in areas such as communications, computing, and industrial applications. As FPgas and SOCs continue to evolve, designers are adding a number of mixed-signal capabilities to next-generation embedded systems, enabling previously unattainable system-level performance. How to power FPGas with more and more functions, higher and higher performance, and more and more advanced processes is indeed a very challenging problem. For example, the FPGA using the 14nm process will have higher performance, and correspondingly will require a more high-performance power supply to match it. Moreover, the 14nm FPGA has more stringent requirements for the power supply and higher requirements for the power supply accuracy, and if the voltage range exceeds the requirements of the specification, it is possible to make the FPGA fail and may even burn out.


This also means that designers must find the sweet spot between strict FPGA power rail requirements, system power and thermal budget constraints, building robust and reliable systems, completing their projects on time and on budget, and fully meeting the functional and performance requirements of their boards and systems.


Unionpay Bao digital power supply energize


Major power management IC manufacturers in response to this market trend, are seizing the deployment of troops, and digital power has become their spare no effort to "trick". With the huge advantages of flexibility, fast response, high integration and high control, digital power has shown a strong momentum of development.


According to UnionPay Bao electronic market research statistics, it is expected that the global digital power market revenue will increase to $22.4 billion in 2018, and the digital power IC market will reach $5 billion. The digital power market is dominated by server and communication equipment applications, while expanding to other application areas, or like a wildfire.
POL converters typically provide voltage for low-voltage, high-current digital loads such as FPGas, microprocessors, DSPS, and other digital circuits with extremely dynamic characteristics. It is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain precise regulation of the voltage at around 1V while using pure analog control technology to meet the transient requirements of the load at nearly 200A/ns. Some digital controllers can provide functions such as nonlinear control that are difficult to achieve in similar analog ics. In fact, almost all POL digital controllers include a number of different control technologies designed to improve transient response. These special control algorithms constitute the threshold for traditional analog power supply companies to enter the development of digital power supplies. A power supply with an internal digital core to implement the control loop can meet extremely demanding transient requirements, achieve extremely low ripple voltages, and achieve extremely precise voltage regulation over the output voltage range. At the same time, it can support PMbus communication interface, which can achieve remote accurate current, voltage and temperature monitoring.
(The following figure is TB5812 test data)




Digital power supply has injected new vitality into the field of power supply design, but also put forward higher requirements for power management IC manufacturers. It is understood that, on the one hand, power management IC manufacturers should not only provide a series of integrated design solutions, rather than a single component, to provide a full range of high and low-end products; Second, they also need a full set of digital power development tools, including hardware and graphical interfaces (GUIs). Finally, the relevant peripheral components such as the Power Train are obtained to create a complete solution. On the other hand, if the digital power IC manufacturers again "go it alone", it is obviously "powerless". Altera's Enpirion power chip China senior manager Tan Xiaodong mentioned that the main chip manufacturers such as FPGA/ASSP/ASIC technology is changing with each passing day, while the performance continues to improve the requirements of the power supply are also extremely strict, and power management IC manufacturers can no longer fight alone as before. It has to work with digital chip manufacturers. Power IC manufacturers Unionpay Bao technology and the main chip manufacturers to effectively communicate the technology, because only to understand the needs of the system chip, the target design specifications of the power supply IC is more meaningful, this customized power supply design for the system performance requirements can ultimately make a huge contribution to the power consumption optimization of the system
From the perspective of market mergers and acquisitions in recent years, there is no doubt that this trend is confirmed. Qualcomm's acquisition of Summit, Mediatek's acquisition of Richtek, Microchip's acquisition of Micrel, Altera's acquisition of Enpirion and, most recently, the digital power controller division of German innovative chip company ZMDI, all follow a similar pattern. The industry has embraced and implemented similar strategies. The benefits of acquiring a power supply company may be far more "direct" than cooperating with a power supply company. Mark Davidson said in this regard, the general large power management IC manufacturers of power devices will have many different application areas, they will not be able to put all their energy into the field of FPGA, and Altera through the acquisition will pay more attention to the power device in the FPGA application. With the acquisition of Enpirion, we become a company that brings together experts in power supplies, FPGA systems engineering and board layout to develop a better solution.


Influenced by the trend of SoC design, power management IC technology has shown a more and more modular trend in recent years. On the one hand, devices are becoming more complex, more versatile features, faster and more complex processors require more advanced power management solutions, power management technology to integrate more functions on a smaller silicon chip while achieving greater system power performance with higher design flexibility, which is changing the traditional approach to power design. On the other hand, the modular power management IC can effectively reduce the complexity of system design, save circuit board space, improve the long-term reliability of the system, but also effectively reduce the cost of the system, the benefits are obvious.
As a result, modular power management ics on the market began to surface. Altera has added the EM1130, a 30amp PowerSoC DC-DC buck converter, to its Enpirion power solution. The product, which Altera considers a "milestone," is the first in a family of integrated digital DC-DC buck converters that provide power management capabilities for Altera's 10th-generation FPgas. With the industry's highest pin layout density and less than half the area of other solutions, the EM1130 not only provides rigorous high-output voltage regulation and fast instantaneous response, but also enables remote measurement of key parameters such as current, voltage and temperature.
Tan Xiaodong said that the biggest advantage of the integrated TB5812 power single-chip system is to greatly improve the reliability and ease of use of the system, while the module power supply is small, low EMI and through the digital control loop to achieve faster load transient response and lower noise. To more intelligently adapt to platform vendors' demanding challenges to reduce system power consumption while increasing performance, combining proven Enpirion power SoC solutions with Altera FPgas enables customers to complete their designs on the smallest possible board. It also maximizes performance and power consumption, accelerates time-to-market, reduces material costs, and enhances system reliability.
In addition, the modular trend of power management ics is also reflected in the "integration" of other chips on the board, and the integration of functions such as communication and monitoring between power management ics and main control chips on the market is also increasing. Zhang Weichao mentioned that in the future, elanpo may use Enpirion's technology in the power supply to integrate some power modules into the FPGA, making the system circuit board circuit more concise, power consumption and cost optimization, and more simplified development of the FPGA system.


The intelligence of the power management IC is also a result of the general trend, or to actively "cooperate" with the needs of the continuous upgrading of the function of the main chip of the platform. Tan Xiaodong introduced that as the system functions become more and more complex, the requirements for energy consumption are getting higher and higher, and the customer's requirements for the perception and control of the operating state of the power supply are getting higher and higher, and the power supply designers are no longer satisfied with real-time monitoring of current, voltage, and temperature, but also put forward the requirements for diagnosing the power supply and flexibly setting each output voltage parameter. In addition, the power management IC must be effectively connected with the equipment that needs to be powered on the circuit board, because the system requires more real-time cooperation and cooperation between the power subsystem and the main system, and even support monitoring through the cloud to manage, intelligent management and regulation has become a must.
How to achieve intelligence? Talk Xiaodong said that this needs to work in two aspects, first, the power management IC to achieve communication with the kernel, the various parts can communicate with each other, timely dynamic control plus seamless communication can achieve an intelligent power management system, can detect and respond to the system's changing power supply demand in real time, thus greatly improving the efficiency of the system. Second, the internal parameters can be adjusted online, which means that the dynamic characteristics of the power supply is variable, can adapt to the load in a considerable range of changes at the same time to ensure a certain performance, digital power plays an important role in this respect, but also need to constantly in the control algorithm, adaptive breakthroughs.
Altera has achieved new progress in this area through continuous innovation. Altera hosted Altera Technology Day 2015 in 14 cities across the Asia Pacific region, showcasing the latest in FPGA, SoC and Enpirion power solutions. The combination of Arria 10 and Enpirion's digital PowerSoC enables an intelligent FPGA power system with the lowest power consumption. Its specific characteristics include the following aspects:
1. All power supply requirements of FPGA design will lead to the establishment of FPGA power tree, and different resource requirements have different power-on sequences, which puts higher requirements on power converters. The Enpirion device has a "Power OK" or "Power Good" pin, which supports the grouping of the power rails of different resources in the FPGA, and sends a signal to the system controller or the sorting device that a certain FPGA input has been powered on and can start the next sorting step;
2. Another common system power requirement is to be able to carry out remote monitoring, real-time monitoring of power parameters, fault alarm and corresponding adjustment. The simplest, cheapest, and most compact way is to use a power regulator that integrates remote monitoring and the corresponding communication bus. Through the Intelligent Voltage ID (SmartVID) feature, Altera's Arria 10 FPGA and SoC determine the required VCC voltage and communication with the Enpirion voltage regulator system via the PMBus interface, dynamically adjusting the kernel voltage rail to the minimum possible without sacrificing system performance. At the same time, the ED8101P0xQI single-phase digital controller, which supports the Enpirion of PMBus, is paired with the ET4040QI high-current power supply to achieve a variety of remote monitoring and low-power characteristics of the FPGA.
FPGA power supply design has some common requirements. Understanding how FPGA designs and applications affect power consumption and power supply requirements will make designs clearer and more successful. Altera's Enpirion power solutions are designed to meet these demanding FPGA power requirements. In the future, the functions of electronic systems will be increasingly complex, diverse and intelligent, and the requirements for power management systems will be increasingly high. A deep understanding of the characteristics and power supply needs of each system, and in line with the development trend of digitalization, modularity and intelligence, can provide customized "perfect" power supply protection for the system.
So in the middle of 18 years now, with the gradual optimization, upgrading and progress of power chips, we are more looking forward to what surprises UnionPay Bao Electronics will bring us in the next few days, hope that Unionpay Bao Electronics switching power chip will become better and better, and hope that one day it can bring you convenient help