Intelligent power management solutions help portable consumer applications

In today’s consumer electronics market, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between product categories. Cell phones are now required to do more than simply make and receive calls, and portable navigation devices (PNDs) need to do more than just get users from point A to point B. The convergence of feature sets between smartphones, personal navigation devices, mobile gaming platforms, and other handheld consumer products is providing consumers with a choice of feature-rich products that will bring tremendous benefits. At the same time, this trend presents a huge challenge to designers of portable applications, as they must now fit all of these different features into a small form factor device and differentiate their product from the competition. In many cases, this is achieved through improved audio quality, improved user interface experience, reduced form factor, and extended battery life. Now, with a new class of highly integrated, intelligent system power management solutions, designers have a tool to help achieve differentiation while also providing them with a flexible architecture that can span multiple platforms and generations of products.

Flexibility and high integration reduce time to market The

need to pack a large number of functions into a single device not only highlights the need for increased integration to reduce size, but also requires a programmable power management solution to support the processor, system memory and other external components (such as WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS) of various applications. Today, many power management solutions are optimized for operation on specific application processors, which can make the design of individual systems easier. However, many OEMs who develop multiple products targeting different geographies and populations can benefit from a more flexible and highly integrated solution that can be reused across multiple platforms with different application processors.

The latest products, such as the IDTP95020 Intelligent System Power Management Solution, achieve this flexibility through a unique architecture that includes an embedded microcontroller (see Figure 1). The embedded microcontroller is used to manage all on-chip resources and supports dynamically programmable system power regulation blocks and an on-chip power management mechanism, which makes the solution extremely flexible. In addition to the programmable switch-mode DC-DC converter and low-dropout (LDO) regulator, the IDTP95020 also integrates battery charge management, white LED drivers, low-power stereo audio and voice codecs with mixer functions, Class D amplifiers and headphone drivers, phase-locked loops (PLLs) for on-chip and off-chip clock generators, and touch screen controllers (see Figure 1). Each of these functional blocks is fully programmable and can be controlled by an embedded microcontroller through a predefined script sequence loaded into the internal memory or external EEPROM. This allows the IDTP95020 to operate independently of the application processor, reducing the need to handle routine affairs and real-time event monitoring. The IDTP95020 also allows the processor to control its functional modules by writing registers through one of the two I2C interfaces (see Figure 2).

This flexibility and programmability not only enables the IDT P95020 to meet the dynamic voltage adjustments required by various application processors, but also enables designers to quickly modify the power management solution to meet the different peripheral requirements of their product portfolio. Solutions that can be reused in multiple products can not only significantly reduce the design resources required to complete these projects, but also help bring these products to market faster. In addition, reusable power management solutions can also help simplify procurement and inventory management.

IDTP95020 Intelligent Power Management Solution

Figure 1: IDTP95020 intelligent power management solution.

Figure 2: Simplify design with integrated power management solutions.

System-Level Impact of Complex User Interfaces

Touchscreens have quickly moved from a luxury feature to a standard feature for a wide range of consumer products. Utilizing an intelligent power management solution like the IDTP9502 that integrates a touchscreen controller and white LED driver, designers can quickly and easily add this functionality without using multiple discrete components, which also helps reduce the burden on the application processor and reduces system power consumption (Figure 2). By moving the need to monitor the touchscreen, buttons, and other user inputs from the application processor to an intelligent system power management solution, the application processor can focus its high-performance processing power on more value-added functions or spend more time in idle or full standby states to reduce the overall power consumption of the system. The IDTP95020 can also take over the control needs of the white LED backlight from the application processor. By integrating the white LED driver and touch screen controller, and using a 12-bit ADC to monitor the performance of other analog system measurements, the IDTP95020 can wake up the display or control its brightness without the application processor.

Integrated Codecs Simplify Audio Processing

In many portable applications, especially those based on discrete application processors and baseband processors, there will be multiple audio inputs and outputs that need to be integrated and conditioned. This has created a need for a centralized audio mixer, a function that in many architectures is performed by the application processor. However, since mixing is a CPU-intensive operation, this places a heavy burden on application processor resources and results in excessive power consumption. Intelligent system power management solutions using embedded audio codecs offer a better approach. By offloading the mixing operations from the application processor, integrated power management solutions such as the IDTP95020 can reduce the processing burden on the application processor, allowing these resources to be used for other functions or putting the processor into a low-power standby state to reduce system power consumption (see Figure 3).

IDT P95020 Audio Routing and Mixing

Figure 3: IDT P95020 Audio Routing and Mixing.

Development Environment

While a fully programmable intelligent power management solution offers designers a great deal of integration and flexibility, it also requires the creation of user-defined power sequencing and scripts to respond to various interrupts and events. To ensure that the creation of these sequencing and scripts does not adversely affect the product's time to market, any power management solution must be developed in a robust development environment. Development tools for the IDTP95020 include an evaluation board that connects directly to the designer's PC. IDT's GUI-based scripting tool features an intuitive drag-and-drop interface that allows designers to define the order of power rails and to create and run tool command language (TCL) scripts to configure the IDTP95020 with predefined sequences of operations and settings. Once designers have completed these script files, the tool loads them directly into the EEPROM on the evaluation board (Figure 4).

DT P95020 Development Environment

Figure 4: DT P95020 Development Environment.

Make Power Management a Strategic Decision

In the past, power management has been a last-minute design consideration in many portable consumer applications. While this approach has served designers well, the choice of power management solution has become more critical as portable consumer devices become more complex and require a variety of features while maximizing battery life. Now, the development of intelligent system power management solutions, such as the IDTP95020, allows designers to make a strategic decision to adopt more flexible, highly integrated solutions that can be used across multiple product platforms and generations. This decision can reduce the design resources required to develop multiple products and shorten time to market, while also helping to optimize system performance and power consumption.