XPhase® Control IC Provides High Density, Scalable Power Solution for POL Converters

International Rectifier introduced the XPhase® IR3513 control IC for point-of-load (POL) converter designs. The IR3513 provides overall control of a scalable number of phases along with an internal gate driver, current sense and sharing, and PWM to provide a stand-alone single-phase regulator or interface with additional phase ICs enabling a power solution with any number of phases. With this arrangement, the final solution requires only a single IC per phase to deploy one to X phases. Alternative approaches require a control IC plus 1 to X driver ICs or scalable “all-in-one” ICs that do not utilize all IC pins or circuitry leading to increased solution cost and size.

The new device features 0.8V to 5.1V output voltage with 0.5 percent system set point accuracy and programmable 250 kHz to 9 MHz daisy-chain digital phase timing to provide a per phase switching frequency of 250 kHz to 1.5 MHz with no external components. A host of protection features include over-voltage protection, detection and protection of open remote sense lines and open control loop protection.

XPhase is IR's distributed multiphase architecture that consists of control ICs and phase ICs that communicate using a simple six-wire bus scheme. Phases can be added or removed without changing the fundamental design. The six-wire bus consists of a three-wire digital phase timing bus, an average current, an error amplifier output and a VID voltage. By eliminating point-to-point wiring between the control and the phase ICs, the six-wire bus shortens interconnections, and reduces parasitic inductance and noise. This simplifies PCB layout and provides a more robust design.

Control IC

Phase ICs

Pricing for the IR3513MTRPbF begins at US $2.25 in 10,000-unit quantities. The devices are RoHS compliant and prices are subject to change.