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PMIC Digital Control Made Simple Using a Single Wire

Date Published: January 22, 2010

Digital control has permeated all aspects of the integrated circuit business, including the analog power management sector. Inter-Integrated Circuit (I²C), System Peripheral Interface (SPI), Power Management Bus (PMBus), and other interfaces have been adapted to the needs of power management chips (PMIC), at the expense of requiring at least three extra pins and a large chunk of die area to implement a digital bus that is in many cases overkill for a simple regulator chip. In many cases, simple power management ICs don’t require the read-write capability provided by these bi-directional data buses. A simple write-only protocol would be sufficient to program these devices without the need for read-back capability.

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Renewable Energy Options for Data Centers

Date Published: May 22, 2009

We have finally reached a point where energy costs have overtaken real estate costs as the primary data center expense. Server density has increased tenfold over the past decade, and the average server's power consumption has quadrupled. A typical data center can easily consume anywhere between 1megawatt (MW) and 20MW of electricity. And, for every dollar an enterprise spends on computing hardware, an additional 50 cents is spent on powering and cooling this hardware. At these levels it is not just the cost of energy, but the stability of that cost that proves worriesome for data center managers everywhere.

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Power Electronics and Renewable Energy, a Contrast by Region in Uncertain Times

Date Published: October 14, 2008

Competitive energy markets, advancing generational technology and innovative financing tools are creating new opportunities for the distributed and cogeneration (DCG) market sector.

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Integrated Battery Charging and Power Delivery Implementations

Date Published: August 8, 2008

The popularity of the different portable consumer devices over the last decade has introduced new requirements in terms of usage time, form factor, environmental friendliness and functionality. Lithium-based rechargeable batteries have emerged as the power source of choice to address these requirements – they offer the highest energy density, no memory effect, better environmental attributes and a reduced self-discharge rate.

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Non-Traditional Thinking Improves Efficiency in Cell Phones

Date Published: July 24, 2008

One of the customers I work with is a company that designs and manufactures cellular phones. This industry is very competitive, and customers have many stringent requirements in this industry. One concern is battery life, and another concern is the size of the phone. Both of these must be optimized while the cost of the phone is minimized. This demand pressures the designers have to scrutinize the design to eliminate components and current drain wherever possible.

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