News Release from: Summit Microelectronics
Edited by the Electronicstalk Editorial Team on 27 January 2004
Award for precision voltage controller
The SMM665 six-channel ultraprecise voltage controller has won the Analog Zone 2003 award for the best engineered power controller.
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The SMM665 six-channel ultraprecise voltage controller has won the Analog Zone 2003 award for the best engineered power controller. The annual award programme recognises outstanding products introduced in a given year. Summit is the only privately held company among the eight recognised in the "power management technology" category.
The others include Linear Technology, Intersil, Analog Devices, ST Microelectronics and Siliconix.
Paul McGoldrick, Analog Zone Editor-in-Chief, said: "To achieve product of the year honours, the chosen product must be a standout in its class, possessing exceptional technical merit as well as well-targeted marketability.
The SMM665 is one of those few products which will fascinate the analogue engineer because of the sheer accuracy of the voltage settings it achieves.
Beyond accuracy, sequencing and margining of supplies is becoming more and more critical in multi-voltage ASICs/processors/DSPs.
The SMM665 can be sequenced in any order and in different ways and achieves highly accurate margining voltage.
The company has carefully listened to potential end users in a myriad of applications, and the decision to offer a factory preprogramming service is a strong additional lure".
The SMM665 has raised the bar on precision analogue performance with Summit's new innovation called active DC output control (ADOC) to intelligently maintain the output voltage of up to six DC/DC convertors on the user's board with dramatically improved accuracy in system use - typically +/-0.1% of voltage output, and guaranteed to +/-0.2%.
This is an order of magnitude improvement over existing solutions that are typically several percent inaccurate.
The SMM665 is rapidly gaining acceptance at a number of enterprise equipment makers - and not only because of its high voltage accuracy.
The SMM665 brings a highly integrated suite of solutions that addresses critical power management requirements.
This includes the higher accuracy DC/DC supply voltage increasingly demanded in high-performance processors, FPGAs and ASICs.
This demand will be ever more critical as semiconductor feature size decreases.
The allowable error can be as low as 10-15mV for state-of-the-art devices.
The innovation embedded in the SMM665 meets these stringent standards.
The SMM665 is also a highly optimised controller with true cascaded sequencing capability so that the user can turn on up to six DC/DC power supplies in any order to accommodate the varied requirements of high-performance load devices.
The ramp of a given supply voltage is not started until the prior voltage has reached its threshold voltage level.
This eliminates the risk of a voltage ramping up out of sequence because the prior voltage has not responded due to loadings problems or other difficulties.
That risk is present in devices that are called sequencers, but which actually just blindly time the turn-on of various voltage supplies.
In addition, the SMM665 is a precision marginer.
Voltage margining is rapidly becoming recognised to have great value as equipment makers strive to improve the reliability of the product that they ship to customers.
Precision margining lets the manufacturer verify each electronic board in production and weed out those with marginal component interactions.
This is done by varying the voltage supply "rails" on the board to find sensitivities that predict longer-term reliability problems and field failure.
The high-accuracy capability of the SMM665 effectively implements margining - unlike other margining controllers with as much as 10% or more inaccuracy that negates the advantages of performing margining in the first place.
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