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Design competitive USB OTG power supply
Universal Serial Bus or “USB” has been around for a long time; at the very beginning, USB had exclusive primary and secondary hosts. The primary data transmission was mainly from the PC and the...
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Small and efficient power supply for the Altera™ MAX® 10 FPGA
Are you designing with Altera’s™ MAX® 10 FPGA? If so, you probably just want a small, efficient and proven power solution without having to devote much thought or design time to it. The power supply...
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Precise Current Limiter for Smart E-Meter
Automatic meter reading (AMR) systems have become more popular in recent years. This technology saves electricity providers the expense of periodic trips to each physical location to read a meter so...
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Power Tips: A simple circuit to implement smooth soft start for an isolated...
Most DC/DC converters require a soft-start circuit to limit the in-rush current at startup. Although a smooth soft start is required for systems with power-on reset (POR), this is difficult for an...
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Buck-boost regulator benefits automotive conducted immunity
An automotive battery’s steady-state voltage ranges from 9V to 16V depending on its state of charge, ambient temperature and alternator operating condition. However, the battery power bus is also...
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Waveform audit: rabbit ears
What does an interning doctor diagnose if he sees symptoms he has never read about in a medical handbook? A similar question can be asked of an integrated circuit (IC) validation engineer early in his...
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Is PMBus still useful without telemetry?
PMBus is an Inter-Integrated Circuit (I2C)-based communication standard/interface for power-supply management. Many point-of-load (POL) converters on the market today are built with the PMBus...
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Lightning-fast internally-compensated ACM topology – what can it do for you?
Internally compensated advanced current mode (ACM) is a new control topology from Texas Instruments that supports true fixed-frequency modulation and synchronization with internal compensation....
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Comparing Bode plots in D-CAP3™ control mode
Converter stability is a primary requirement for any synchronous buck converter design. Confirming converter stability requires that you derive the small-signal transfer function and measure the Bode...
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LDO basics: Current limit
The key goal of DC power management is to provide a regulated, steady voltage for the slew of electronic content present in any system. This is particularly true for low-dropout regulators (LDOs), as...
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Good pin practices with buck converters
Many synchronous buck converter designers face a common issue: how best to connect the open drain power-good flag, also known as the power-good (PGOOD) pin. In this post, I will explore the expected...
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How to approach a power supply design – part 2
In the first installment of this two-part series, I described how important it is to have a good specification for properly designing a power supply. In part 2, I will outline which parameters of your...
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A simple and efficient LED driver for video surveillance cameras
Video surveillance security monitoring is in demand, and the technology has also become more affordable for both personal and commercial use. Compelled by the need for better security, millions of...
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Power Tips: How to upgrade a legacy power bank to USB Type-C™
With more and more portal devices adopting the USB Type-C™ connector, designing a power bank capable of charging these devices is suddenly a big deal. Unfortunately, the USB Type-C connector is a...
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Powering the Intel® Arria 10 GX FPGA with a PMBus Multiphase Buck DC/DC...
Field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are increasingly complex system-on-chips (SoCs) that include not just programmable logic gates and random access memory (RAM) but also analog-to-digital...
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LDO basics: noise – part 1
In another LDO basics blog post, I discussed using a low-dropout regulator (LDO) to filter ripple voltage arising from switched-mode power supplies. This isn’t the only consideration for achieving a...
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How adding an eFuse will protect your brand’s reputation
This past weekend, one of my friends asked for my opinion on which brand of TV to buy. One of the first things that came to mind was my “gut feel” on which brand had the best reputation. We discussed...
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Charge electronic locks for shared bikes with the sun
In large cities, the concept of “shared bikes” started several years ago. Anyone can rent a bike and return it to various docking stations throughout the city with a credit card. The rider is charged...
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Making smart meter eFuses robust and reliable
Replacing existing meters (which still use technology developed decades ago), smart meters use a secure connection network to automatically and wirelessly send energy usage to utility companies. The...
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Synchronous buck controller solutions support wide VIN performance and...
At the epicenter of most power converter implementations is the inevitable trade-off of efficiency and power density. However, new applications are coming to fruition that have unique power solution...
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