Flexible PMICs can be configured easily for broad applications
Date: 09/12/2020
By keeping high flexibility in the mind, Qorvo has launched a family of power management IC family targeting quite a broad range of applications. They have designed PMICs in such a way that, with easy configurability, they can be quickly designed to power products such as solid-state drives, video router, and low-power mobile and IOT devices. The family named ACT88327/8/9/1 Constant-On-Time (COT) PMIC is designed to provide good quality lowest output voltage down to 0.5 V for powering LPDDR5 chips. A proprietary feature called ACOT control enable these chips to give best performance at low output voltage.
The three built-in type DC to DC converters and two LDOs can be configured through a I2C bus interface in such a way that, one of the buck regulator and a LDO can be configured as a load switch. One of the buck regulator can also be configured in peak current mode delivering output DC closest to the input DC voltage by using a fixed frequency which can be switched at 1.125 MHz or 2.25 MHz. The other two buck regulators uses synchronous constant on-time, ACOT, control architecture to optimise the load transient response by using smaller output capacitors. All the buck regulators are designed to work with 0,47 mH inductor only requiring three small components. One of the low dropout regulator can drive a current up to 390 mA and 1 A in bypass mode. Both the low dropouts only requires small ceramic capacitors.
Another interesting feature is, its general-purpose I/O can be configured into functions such as interrupt, external enable, reset, external PG, regulator ON/OFF, sleep/deep sleep modes, DVS, VID, power recycle, and push button.
The options such as startup time, slew rate, system-level sequencing, switching frequency, sleep modes and operating modes can be realised through configuration.
