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Power management controller optimises power supply design

The digital power management controller, PV3012, has been introduced by Powervation represented by ED-V Gesellschaft für Elektronik + Design. The product is the first of Powervation's second generation of digital power ICs featuring real-time auto-compensation for the automatically adaptive DC/DC conversion. The controller optimises the performance and energy-efficiency of power-supply systems. The company’s patented Auto-control technology continuously compensates for load transients and changes in the output impedance. The real-time algorithm automatically optimises regulation and removes the need for the designer to compensate the loop. One advantage of adaptive control is that power stage uncertainty is reduced by the parametric estimation. With this, the system becomes robust, and the limitations on control performance to achieve robustness are relaxed. The patented technology continuously tunes parameters during operation and deals with a range of power-stage variations and power-stage dynamics.

The benefits include voltage stability, transient response and ease of design. The technology compensates silicon ageing and degradation in components, thereby gives power-supply quality and stability for the life of the system. One key feature of the digital power management controller is DSS (Digital Stress Sharing) to eliminate hot spots in parallel connections and to reduce the board temperature by 10°C to increase equipment life time. DSS is useful in modern power architectures where electrical and thermal stress need to be actively balanced between an arbitrary number of digitally controlled DC/DC switch-mode power converters. To improve long term reliability of the power supply and data retention, Powervation uses a fuse-based memory technology (OTPs) instead of flash. This allows higher temperature operations of the power supply.