Dialog integrates power management for Atom
By Graham Prophet -- EDN Europe, 01 Jun 2009
Introducing its DA6001 powermanagement companion chip for the Intel Atom processor, Dialog Semiconductor’s embedded marketing manager Michael Maurer observes of the numerous examples that have appeared on the market recently: “Industrial Atom boards have a lot of expensive discrete components.” Many of these are concerned with provision and management of power and clocking; Dialog designed the 6001 to provide all power supplies, power management—including sequencing—and clock supplies for processors in the Z5xx series (the Menlow family).
Without such a management chip, Maurer says, you will have to design-in a separate microcontroller for start-up control, power-down sequencing and state-transition control for the Atom; you will need to provide multiple regulated voltage rails; and you will have to arrange the—up to—six clock systems that the chip demands. Dialog estimates such a design to have up to 20 active and 180 passive components—one of which is a microcontroller that must run 100% of the time.
From a single supply voltage, the DA6001 provides low-noise supplies to all platform voltage domains and current for system DDR2 memory. Four dc/dc buck converters power the platform’s hardware engine, the SCH (system controller hub— the Atom’s “system chip”) core and FSB (front-side bus), both internal and external system memory—up to 2 Gbytes—and the CPU core, meeting the precision requirements of the IMVP-6 specifi cation for the Intel Atom processor. The chip senses all output voltages at the point of delivery, for accurate regulation. The core buck converter will drive external FETs to supply over 4A, while the two high-current converters—FSB and memory—will similarly yield 5.2 and 3.2A, respectively. The chip only caters for the kernel of an Atom design: Dialog says that the peripheral mix that you might employ in designs spanning a broad range of industrial designs and in-car infotainment are too broad to cover effi ciently in a single device. It does, however, supply clocking for two PCIexpress channels in addition to the core. A clock synthesiser/ driver that meets Intel’s CK610 specifi cation derives all clocks via three separate fractional-division PLLs. In order to meet automotive-industry demands, the PLLs include spreadspectrum capability.
Six LDO (low-dropout) voltage regulators supply other platform power demands using Dialog’s Smart Mirror technique, removing the need for a low-power mode and simplifying power control in the system. A dedicated push-pull LDO integrated into the device terminates the address lines of the external RAM. The chip provides the correct operating conditions for the Atom when it transitions from one operating mode to another using a state machine; Dialog says that this state machine consumes under 10 A rather than the several milliamperes that a microcontroller would need. A dedicated pin supports suspend-to-RAM operation, and you can multiplex two analogue signal inputs to a 10-bit ADC.
Dialog expects to design three versions of the chip, two of which are for automotive applications; an AEC-Q100- qualifi ed part will be available later in 2009. The chip comes in a 144-pin VFBGA package measuring 1010 mm and featuring a 0.8-mm ball pitch, dissipates around 1.5W at full output power, and costs about $4 in high volume.
Dialog has committed that “the device family will expand to support future Intel Atom processors and platforms for the embedded and portable space”: Intel has already indicated that the successor to the Menlow platform will be Moorestown— which will be launched in late 2009 or early 2010—which will bring, among other features, a ten-fold reduction in idle power.
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