PowerWise™ Energy Management Unit

National Semiconductor Corp. of Santa Clara, California, released PowerWise™, the industry’s first digitally controlled LP5550 energy management unit (EMU). Used in conjunction with National’s advanced power controller (APC), intelligent energy manager (IEM) and technology from ARM Ltd., Cambridge, UK, it reduces the power consumption of digital processor cores by up to 70%.

Digital processor consumption is reduced by adaptively adjusting its supply voltage to the minimum level needed. It includes an adaptive supply-voltage buck regulator for the processor core and three additional fixed-voltage regulators. The fixed-voltage regulators powers the input/output ring, oscillator/phase-locked loops (PLL) and memory on a low-power system-on-chip (SoC). The PWI interface controls the LP5550’s functions for simple interfacing to the digital processor.

The LP5550 supports the PWI interface, a 2-pin, high-speed, serial power management control interface for advanced processor power management. To enable adaptive voltage scaling, the LP5550 includes a digitally-controlled, 300mA, 0.6V to 1.2V buck regulator with up to 90% efficiency. In addition, it has three programmable low drop-out (LDO) regulators with output voltages ranging from 0.6 V to 3.3V. One LDO supports 100mA and the other two support 250mA.

Packaged in a 16-pin LLP® package, the LP5550 has excellent package thermal characteristics and operates over the full temperature range from -40°C to +85°C, with input voltages from 3.0V to 5.5V.

For more information, visit www.national.com.