Battery Charge Management: Flexibility is the key for
And past use of portable electronic products as disposable batteries or alkaline batteries of different power, today, whether laptop, cell phone or MP3/MP4 player, all the basic use of lithium ion, nickel cadmium or nickel-hydrogen rechargeable batteries, not only reduce the use of cost-benefit environmental protection, more importantly, a larger battery capacity can be done to get a longer battery life. Rechargeable batteries because of their characteristics are also made to the system developers, the new requirements, in order to make rechargeable batteries have a longer life, the correct charge circuit design and component selection is critical, whether it is an external charger or the system internal rechargeable power management solutions are required depending on the use of careful consideration.
Single-chip charge management solution, or will become a mainstream
In portable products, battery charge can usually be two ways, one is to use the system itself, plus a host MCU PWM demodulation unit (PWM) to achieve, and the other is the use of highly integrated single chip charge management IC . "Single-chip charge management IC's greatest strength is to have a higher reliability, while the MCU + PWM solution is simple and cheaper." Marketing manager for Fujitsu Microelectronics Wang Yun in an interview with reporter explained, "Manufacturing Systems providers can cost, reliability and so the pros and cons comparing the two programs, you can choose the most appropriate option. In the long run, single-chip charge management IC with the declining cost and increased functionality and external communications, and more of the applications more reliable selection of a single chip will become a trend. "
According to Wang Yun introduced Fujitsu's charge management products are mainly located in the 2Cell of the market, and 2 ~ 4Cell applications have to be the biggest market of them notebook computers. From 15 years ago, Fujitsu R & D team to power management of laptop computers and Fujitsu R & D department, has begun the development of the charge management for laptops IC. Through several generations of continuous development and improvement of products, new research and development of lithium battery charge management ICMB39A132 and MB39A134 in Taiwan and mainland China has been applied to many manufacturers, but also by the recent high-profile attention to the netbook market. "In notebook applications, which, due to charge the battery a few years ago after another explosion occurred, so that the design of the notebook manufacturers increasingly take charge part of the design, management section in charge will be selected on the stability and reliability of high quality big brand power management IC. "he said.
However, BCD Semiconductor Corporation from AC / DC Product Director Dr. Wu Xin MCU + PWM is more optimistic about the program, he considered that the formation of special charge management IC circuit control scheme is simple, but relatively simple function, usually only on the specific parameters of the lithium-ion battery charging, and different models of portable products often use different model specifications of the lithium-ion batteries, if using a dedicated chip, the development will result in duplication and waste of resources.
"Implemented by MCU + PWM Buck circuit and control method of low cost flexible and can easily be improved and upgraded, can be applied to a variety of lithium-ion battery." Wu Hsin said.
BCD Semiconductor is an analog signal integrated circuits in the Greater China manufacturers (IDM), in power management IC product design development and manufacturing. Unlike the rest of the market Fabless design companies, BCD has a 6-inch semiconductor wafer fab
(Including Bipolar, CMOS, BiCMOS, and BCDMOS and other production processes), can product design and advanced technology to optimize product performance and cost, to provide a cost-effective system solution.
In fact BCD Semiconductor's focus is on high efficiency and low cost AC / DC off-line power adapter / charger controller chip, the company developed in 2006, the first generation of the primary side controller AP370x series is the first launch of its kind on the market products. According to reports, AP370x using the primary control and output cable compensation proprietary technology, built-in temperature compensation and transformer primary inductance compensation, you can save optocoupler and secondary case of feedback control circuit to achieve high accuracy output voltage and current control , thereby greatly reducing the number of power circuit components, simplifying the circuit design has been successfully used in mobile phones, wireless, cordless phones and wireless routers and other products charger / adapter. "To further improve the power conversion efficiency, lower standby power consumption, we further introduced the industry's leading five-star standard to meet the second generation of the primary side controller AP376x series, the following no-load power consumption 30mW can easily meet, including energy Star EPSv2.0 and five-star standard mobile phone charger all the world, including the charger / adapter, energy efficiency and load specifications. "Wu Hsin said.
Increasing diversity of input power
With the growing diversity of people's living environment can be used for battery charging power supply is also becoming more diverse, in addition to the traditional 220VAC adapter, the user also want at any time through USB port or car power source for various devices such as battery charging, user requirements in addition to charging the device can continue to use its features while, so charging management circuit devices need to be more flexible to accommodate a wider range of applications.
Obviously, the new requirements to the system manufacturers greater challenge. "The challenge comes from the first charge management IC requires a wider operating voltage range, thus requiring the use of higher voltages for semiconductor chip design process." Wang Yun said, "The second challenge is to ask the IC to the different input power to make corresponding adjustments, as well as battery charging and system power management can make some. "Fujitsu MB39A132/134 his charge management IC as an example explained by the distribution of the dynamic input current to ensure that the system power and battery charging can be stable.
The AC adapter / USB / Car power provided by the voltage and current are not the same, while the rechargeable battery voltage and number are not the same, when the charging voltage is higher than the supply voltage to be carried out through the step-up charge, such movements charge management IC pressure not seen in the market. Besides working at the same time charging the device, requiring charge management IC have a good anti-jamming design, keeping in mind the case of low battery voltage, charge current is greater than the discharge current to ensure that, to avoid "living beyond their means" to happen. "Charging IC design from the point of view, the current challenges include: 1, how to further improve efficiency and reduce the standby charge power; 2, how to effectively manage multi-channel power supply and the load; 3, and also how to improve the charging rate to ensure the safety of battery life; 4, how to further expand the flexible charging control configuration to meet the requirements of different types of battery charge. "Xin Wu added.
He believes that portable devices such as cell phone chargers charger is a relatively mature and stable market, domestic producers are mostly corresponding to the main manufacturing, technology development, the power is relatively weak. And the charger itself is commodity nowadays, manufacturers relatively great pressure on cost control, acceptance of new technologies is relatively low. In recent years due to public awareness of environmental protection, government and various environmental organizations, agencies, including phone makers themselves, have raised a number of energy-saving environmental standards related to the charger, for example, the Ministry of Industry of China promulgated the "Mobile Communications Handset charging and interface requirements and test methods "(YD/T1591-2006), Energy Star EPS2.0, mobile phone charger grading standards, etc., are designed to reduce resource waste, improve energy efficiency and reduce the load Konghao. The introduction of these standards charger products largely driven by technological innovation.
"Chinese manufacturers are the major difficulties faced by designers of the technical practice of not charging, charging failure to fully grasp the design requirements." Wang Yun said, "while the function of each charge management IC is different, the user of the new lack of understanding of product design was not approachable. The solution mainly depends on charge management IC manufacturers to increase market products and technologies, to provide multi-faceted designer technical support, so that designers can quickly grasp the design of Charge Management technology. "
Notebook designs, engineers charge management IC design very seriously, otherwise the problem will cost the event a lot of time and energy engineers, so early detection of problems in research and development is critical. Wang Yun said that in addition to providing evaluation board for Fujitsu's customers system evaluation, but also developed a laptop power supply design evaluation system, through the system, as long as the customer can provide a complete circuit of any problems that may occur prior to full inspection R & D to help reduce the risk.
Occurred late last year for the global financial tsunami hit big consumer electronics products, "but we are delighted to find that consumer electronics has started to recover before the overall economy. In particular, benefited from state subsidies home appliances, notebook computers and LCD TVs rapid warming and other markets. "Wang Yun said. "Next year we will continue to increase in the power management IC R & D investment, will be the latest version of the charge management products. In recent years the development of new energy technologies, high-profile battery technology, lithium / lithium-iron batteries will also be will be applied to more products were. from the power management IC point of view, more secure, more accurate, multiple protection features, external communications, cell balancing function and multiple charge and discharge the battery will be a wide-input voltage battery charger and so on The future development trend of management. "
Integrated programmable logic devices using high-power management
Energy-saving design the most serious challenge is to use the microprocessor to manage the power supply. Microprocessors are not optimized for power management, they must deal with too many instructions, and the reaction time is slow, may lead to thermal breakdown, and even sudden catastrophic failure of circuit boards and systems. Although the use of microprocessors in power management has been the traditional approach, but using the power management logic devices faster and more reliable.
Lattice Semiconductor introduced in April 2009 PowerManagerII series of new products, including POWR1220AT8 for power monitoring, repair and voltage measurements provide an excellent solution for programmable devices that can replace the reset generator, control IC, Watchdog Timer control, sequencing / tracking and hot swap circuits, and other IC, to provide users with the necessary tools and functionality to meet the large-scale base stations, high-end servers and small single-board computer systems such as the green standard of energy saving. Depending on the design, energy savings vary, but save 30% are not uncommon.
Reduce power consumption and energy conservation is an important way to turn off the unused portion of the circuit board and IC load is low, reducing the power consumed. PowerManagerII highly integrated programmable voltage monitor IC to integrate the device into a device which helps reduce system cost and improve reliability. For example, PowerManagerII1220AT8 monitoring power up to 12 circuit boards, providing up to 20 open-drain (open-drain) digital outputs and 8 DC-DCtrim/margin output. 48 on-chip macrocell CPLD and four programmable timer, the device generates a CPU reset signal, including pulse trailing and power failures interrupted. 20 There are four output can be configured for high-voltage MOSFET drivers. There are six general-purpose digital inputs can be used for other control functions.
One advantage of this design is that they can be sensitive to any platform using the power as standard power management solutions. Platforms and product lines in the entire establishment of such a standard solution obtained by the efficiency of the obvious, from the design time and the required number of devices can be manifested. Energy-saving devices for low power consumption and the demand for greatly increased over the past few years, and this trend will continue, it is expected that integrated programmable power management devices will be more widely used.
Lattice plans to the next generation of power management devices to improve integration and includes more features, not only can support power management, but also realize the management of the circuit board itself. Its function will be expanded to include temperature monitoring, fan control, NV error log, the user logic and system interfaces. In addition to power management products, the company also offers a series of low power programmable logic devices, including ultra low-power CPLD and LatticeECP3FPGA ispMACH4000KZE series, which is only about the cost and power consumption with the other half of FPGA SERDES functions.
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