PMBus and Power Supply Telemetry

Thanks CM for the response.

After reading your response I got to thinking about an appropriate application. As a former IT Systems administrator I found the data that could be collected through SNMP was overwhelming but seem to do little to improve operations. Yeah I can report the interface is down. I can associate alarms with the down interface. I can make a report on the alarms but I needed a body to go fix the problem. Those bodies were few and far between.

I did consider if I was NASA monitoring something like the space shuttle, then there was an application for the technology.

ctammann Ok, Ill bite I have maybe 10 - 20 different modules It would be nice to monitor the modules in one place. most of the time startup is very easy. push in the breaker.

~~Cris

Thanks Cristina. If you already can monitor your power then this functionality may not really add much to your design. The ability to control startup and shutdown of independent supplies in the system could still buy you something. True this can be done more simply by toggling enable bits on regulators, but with the system controller you can more precisely control things like sequencing, ramp down time, current limits, etc. Part of the reason I wanted to do this webinar was just to get engineers to pause and think about whether or not they may benefit from this capability. They may or may not, but either way its cool tech and worth pondering just in case it could enhance your product in a way you hadn't previously considered.

Thanks

Chris

Thanks for the feedback Sean. I think it might be the kind of thing where if you don't see why you would need it, you probably don't, lol. For a design that could benefit from powering down subsystems not in use, it could be very valuable as that functionality could be programmed from the system controller and be done seamlessly when those subsystems aren't in use. That could increase product life by reducing run time and/or reduce power consumption when subsystems are left idle and powered.

If you think about products that run over industrial temp ranges for example, what if you could monitor both the IC temperature and monitor the current consumption on any or all rails. When you see the current start climbing as the box gets hotter, you could throttle back performance, turn off features, etc to keep the devices from approaching thermal shutdown.

The biggest pro I see as the technology has matured is that you no longer have to pay a premium to get this ability. As I noted, if you don't want to use it, you don't have to. However if you are looking at 2 architectures that provide similar performance, one has it and one doesn't, if it's not going to cost me that much more it's a nice feature to have in the back pocket.

Thanks again for the feedback!

Chris

I to the most part agree with colporteur In real -life I don't know how much it would help. I work in the aviation field, it would be nice to have my power instrumented. But I know how much power and voltage is on the bus. I have two-panel meters one for the voltage and the other the Current, and there is a switch, to switch between the buses.

~~Cris