News & Events
Intersil's New 4-Channel Supervisory IC Fills Market Gap with Easy Programmability and Accuracy Along with Space and Cost Savings
MILPITAS, CA, September 29, 2003 Intersil Corporation (NASDAQ: ISIL), a world leader in the design and manufacture of high performance analog solutions, today announced a new 4-channel voltage supervisory IC, the ISL6536. This space and cost saving Intersil Endura power IC fills a market gap left by legacy solutions for accurately monitoring and reporting on the status of multiple voltage rails. Four bus voltages can be accurately monitored with this single IC and a handful of resistors used to program voltage thresholds.
This supervisory function is critical for reliable operation in many of todays applications such as: computing, communications, graphics, industrial, medical and instrumentation systems. Voltage supervision prevents power from being applied to CPUs, GPUs, DSPs, and ASICs before all supplies are present and stable. Otherwise, damage would occur to these sensitive and costly components.
Legacy solutions have been far less integrated and more spread out across the board with a greater bill of materials and associated manufacturing costs. The ISL6536 eliminates this excess while offering simple programming and accuracy. Using an internal 0.63-V reference, the ISL6536 is able to provide accurate monitoring of four separate voltage buses at and above 0.7 V. Thresholds for each monitored voltage bus are set independently using a simple resistor voltage divider. Virtually any voltage level can be monitored simply using a resistor divider, which drops the voltage to 0.63 V for comparison.
Operation of the ISL6536 is straightforward. After the IC is properly powered and enabled and all four voltage monitor (VMON) inputs are satisfied, the power good (PGOOD) output will go high to signal that voltage is valid on all four rails. Subsequently when the monitored voltage on any rail drops below its user-defined threshold point, the PGOOD output goes low. Each rails VMON point is independently adjustable with a simple resistor divider.
The PGOOD output is guaranteed to be valid even with the ICs supply voltage as low as 1 V. Also, the PGOOD output is an open-drain to allow OR-ing of multiple supervisory ICs and interfacing to a range of logic levels. The ENABLE input provides for a reset of the PGOOD output when it is pulled down below 0.5 V. With an internal 10-uA pull-up to VDD, the ENABLE can be signaled using common logic or pulled to ground with a push button switch. The ISL6536 is also designed to ignore 30-us transients at the VMON inputs, which eliminates would-be glitching.
ISL6536 Technical Summary
- 2.7 V to 4 V IC supply voltage
- 4 channels monitors 4 voltage buses, each 0.7 V or higher
- Independent resistor divider threshold setting for each channel
- Active high PGOOD signal with ENABLE reset
- PGOOD is open-drain to allow OR-ing and logic-level matching
- PGOOD remains valid until the IC supply (VDD) falls below 1 V
- VMON glitch immunity, ignores 30-us transients
- 0.63 V internal reference voltage
- 8-lead SOIC package, industrial temperature range
The ISL6536IB (SOIC) is available now. The suggested resale price is $0.75 for each IC in 4999 to 9999 unit quantities. About Intersil
Intersil Corporation is a leader in the design and manufacture of high performance analog semiconductors. The company’s products address three of the industry’s fastest growing markets - flat panel displays, optical storage (CD and DVD recordable) and power management. Intersil products include power management devices for battery management, hot-swap and hot-plug controllers, linear regulators, supervisory ICs, switching DC-DC regulators and power MOSFET drivers; optical storage laser diode drivers; DSL line drivers; video and high performance operational amplifiers; data converters; interface ICs; analog switches and multiplexers; crosspoint switches; voice-over-IP devices; and ICs for military, space and rad-hard applications. For more information about Intersil or to find out how to become a member of our winning team, visit the company’s web site and career page at: www.intersil.com.
This release may include "forward looking statements" that are subject to risks and uncertainties. For information identifying economic, political, climatic, currency, regulatory, technological, competitive and some other important factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those anticipated in the forward looking statements, see Intersil’s Safe Harbor Forward Looking Statement disclaimer found at http://www.intersil.com/legal.asp, as well as Intersil’s SEC filings as updated from time to time, found at http://www.sec.gov. Endura is a trademark of Intersil Americas Inc.
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