The ADP3192 power controller from Analog Devices (ADI) is designed to improve system stability and reliability, while reducing board space and cost in computers and gaming consoles through reduced requirements for bulk capacitance. The controller leverages ADI’s enhanced pulse-width-modulation (EPWM) architecture.
Large amounts of capacitance are typically required to respond to the CPU’s power supply demands. The ADP3192 dramatically reduces the number of capacitors required; previous power supply solutions required as many as 11 bulk capacitors. Furthermore, the EPWM architecture is a robust solution that promotes system reliability and stability by supporting next-generation CPUs that exhibit much higher load-rate changes.
ADI’s EPWM and Flex-mode architectures allow the ADP3192 to address the CPU’s power needs faster with a non-linear control technique, which indicates the amount of current the power
supply must support. Again, this load-step is consistently shifting depending on system requirements such as the need to support high-resolution graphics.
Analog Devices’ EPWM development enhances the existing industry-standard pulse-width-modulation (PWM) architecture by increasing loop gain to improve transient response times when load step occurs. This architecture maintains accurate phase balance in all dynamic mode conditions. Flex-mode is a multi-mode control loop architecture designed to proportionally convert voltages across multiple inductors.
The ADP3192 is optimized for converting a 12-V supply into core output voltages between 0.5 V and 1.6 V. In doing so, it reads an 8-bit voltage identification (VID) code directly from the processor. The phase relationship of the output signals can be programmed to provide 2-, 3- or 4-phase operation. The ADP3192 is sampling now with full production scheduled for May 2006. Pricing is $1.30 each in 1000-piece quantities in a 40-pin LFCSP.