Monitoring Chip Seeks Sites On Pentium II Motherboards

Designed to provide measurement and limit comparison of up to four power supplies and two processor core voltages, plus temperature, two fan speeds and chassis intrusion, ADM9240 chip is a complete system hardware monitor for microprocessor-based systems. The DMI 2.0-compliant monitoring device includes on-chip temperature sensing, supply voltage attenuation network and fan speed monitoring circuitry, as well as A/D conversion to facilitate communication over the SMBus. Also, on-chip DAC is used to control fan speed for present and next-generation ACPI-compliant systems. The device is optimized for use in motherboards that feature the Pentium II processor, with its low power and I2C-compatible interface making it suited for hardware monitoring and protection application in PCs, network servers, microprocessor-based electronic test equipment and office electronics. Values measured can be read out through an I²C-compatible system management bus, and values for limit comparisons can also be programmed over the same serial bus. The device comes with a comprehensive reference design, including pc board layout and schematics, and an evaluation board with Visual Basic GUI.