Fuerstenfeldbruck, Germany: National Semiconductor has developed what it claims is 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, when used in conjunction with National's 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.
The 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 SoC. The PWI interface controls the LP5550's functions for simple interfacing to the digital processor.
In addition, it supports the PWI interface, a 2pin, high-speed serial power management control interface for advanced processor power management. To enable adaptive voltage scaling, the LP5550 includes a digitally controlled, 300mA, 0.6V to 1.2V buck regulator with up to 90% efficiency. In addition, it has three programmable low drop-out (LDO) regulators with output voltages ranging from 0.6V to 3.3V. One LDO supports 100mA and the other two support 250mA.
Packaged in a small-footprint, lead-free, 16pin LLP(r) package, the LP5550 operates over the temperature range from -40 degrees C to +85 degrees C, with input voltages from 3.0V to 5.5V.