Alliance Semi Offers ASM1232/1832 Supervisor ICs

Alliance Semiconductor Corp. (Santa Clara, CA) announced the expansion of its family of CPU supervisor products to include two new product families, the ASM1232 and ASM1832 general-purpose supervisors, which are designed to keep systems from malfunctioning during power-up, power-down or brownout conditions. The ASM1232 and ASM1832 ICs are low-power supervisory circuits designed for monitoring power supplies in microprocessor and microcontroller-based systems.

The ICs include a de-bounced manual reset input, as well as configurable dual-level threshold detection to restart a "hung" microprocessor in the event voltages drift out of tolerance or even after complete power supply failure. The pushbutton manual reset allows the user to externally invoke a reset, during a "hang" or when the system has become unresponsive. To further enhance system reliability, an internal watchdog timer can be configured to automatically reset the microprocessor after a preset period of inactivity. This is especially useful in set-top box and telecom applications where a loss of signal or instability may cause undesired responses, requiring a soft reset to be initiated.

The ASM1232 and ASM1832 include tolerance select inputs that can be used to specify reset threshold tolerances of 5% and 10% for the ASM1232 in 5 V applications, and 10% and 20% for the 3.3 V ASM1832. Both parts include a pushbutton manual reset input and a watchdog timer with reset functionality that is user configurable to time-out periods of 150 ms, 610 ms or 1,200 ms.

Production quantities are available now in eight-pin and lead-free packages, and are available in commercial and industrial temperature ranges of 0 °C to 70 °C and –40 °C to +85 °C. Pricing for the ASM1232 and ASM1832 is $0.80 per unit in volumes of 1,000.