Lattice has made available two new application notes for the company’s award winning Platform Manager devices that will enable customers to quickly adopt the new architecture.  

“The number of power supply rails in a circuit board has been steadily increasing,” said Shakeel Peera, Director of Strategic Marketing for Lattice Semiconductor.  “These new application notes help expedite implementation of a centralized, scalable and flexible power management algorithm within a single Platform Manager device.”  

Power management functions include supply sequencing, monitoring, hot-swap control, reset and other supervisory signal generation.  The complexity of power management functions grows significantly when the number of circuit board power supplies increases.  The solution often demands the use of multiple power management devices.  As a result, designers typically are forced to partition the overall power management task and implement it using distributed algorithms in multiple devices, a costly and time consuming approach.  The inadequacies of this approach become apparent only during the board debug stage, forcing board re-spin and costly project delays.  The integrated power management approach made possible by the Platform Manager devices, on the other hand, reduces cost and increases board reliability. 


The application notes describe unrestricted access to power supply status indicators and the ability to control all board management functions.  Designers are easily able to modify their algorithm to meet unforeseen power management requirements and minimize the need for a board re-spin.

The application note entitled ‘AN6089: Scalable Centralized Power Management with Field Upgrade Support’ describes how the Platform Manager device can be used as a centralized controller to implement flexible sequencing and precision monitoring of up to 36 power supply rails on a circuit board. The note also discusses the use of a star topology and fast serial interface to provide a seamless, scalable solution to manage up to 36 power supply rails using additional Lattice Power Manager II devices.

The application note entitled ‘AN6088:  Fail-Safe Sequencing During Field Upgrades with Platform Manager’ describes how to enable field updates to the power management algorithm with a fail-safe sequencing backup that restores board operation if the field update procedure is interrupted.

Software Support for Power Manager II and Platform Manager Products
Designs for the Power Manager II and Platform Manager devices are implemented using Lattice PAC-Designer and Lattice Diamond design software tools that are available for download free of charge from the Lattice website at www.latticesemi.com/pac-designer and www.latticesemi.com/latticediamond.  

For more information about Power Manager Devices, visit http://www.latticesemi.com/products/powermanager/index.cfm

Download Platform Manager Application Note AN6089
http://ww3.latticesemi.com/2012-05PlatformManagerEnhancedSolutions_AN6089.html

Download Platform Manager Application Note AN6088
http://ww3.latticesemi.com/2012-05PlatformManagerEnhancedSolutions_AN6088.html