slightly OT: can SMPS chips have a personality, let alone two?

[capslock]

I have long suspected some electronics to have a mind of their own, especially other people's hifi components that I fix occasionally, or my own amp and DAC designs. They will usually start to misbehave only after I have put the last screw of the lid back on.

But this morning, I nearly had a fit when opening my emails.

From a National Semiconductor product update:

Multiple-Output Switching Regulators, featuring the LM5115
"Dual Personality Controller"

8O

[capslock]

Gives a new meaning to Moore's law (shrinking components), doesn't it?

I wonder if a SMPS shrink makes good money...

[cjd]

I wonder if a SMPS shrink makes good money...

All hail Susan Calvin.

I took a look at that e-mail and promptly realized it was *way* over my head. I couldn't even make out the contrails.

C

[JonMarsh]

Yeah, this is a part with a secondary side synchronous buck controller designed to work off the pulse waveform from the primary regulated output, and by controlling the duty cycle on the control (high side) FET in the buck regulator, regulate another output indepedent of the primary output, while still maintaining high efficiency (unlike what a linear regulator would do), and hopefull with a more compact and faster regulated solution than an older mag amp regulator would provide.

Uh, BTW, this IS my day job kind of stuff, in case you're curious- semiconductor solutions for switch mode power supplies. But I think Eric knows that...

They have some nice control IC designers over at National, and there's a couple of parts of their's I've been playing with, such as designed for current fed push-pull or current fed buck converters.

It's a dual personality part because it's capable of operating as a secondary output post regulator, synchronized to the primary regulator, OR as a standalone buck regulator. Buck PWM converters are step down voltage regulators with out galvanic isolation. They're used in DC/DC conversion applications where the regulated voltage is somewhere in the range of 2:1 to 10:1 step down from the source voltage. Motherboard CPU power supplies are multiple phase buck regulators... there's at least one in every PC. Some of the cool motherboards, like my favorite Gigabyte models, use two 3 phase regulators in parallel to make a high performance six phase regulator for an AMD64 processor.

Hmmm, this is kind of like "Zorro Unmasked", I guess, as you've now discovered my Clark Kent normal identity....

~Jon