New Industry Products

National Semiconductor Introduces LM3700 Family of Supervisory ICs

February 11, 2001 by Jeff Shepard

National Semiconductor (Furstenfeldbruck, Germany) announced a new family of supervisory ICs with a variety of factory-programmable features that can be configured in hundreds of possible combinations. Housed in the chip-scale micro SMD package, the LM3700 family uses EEPROM technology and is designed to monitor power supplies in intelligent instruments, cellular phones, computers, PDAs, pagers and other systems containing microprocessors, microcontrollers or DSPs. The ICs are also suited for industrial and automotive applications.

Features of the new ICs include power on reset, four reset timeout periods, a manual reset input, and four output types. Additionally, the LM3700 family has a power fail comparator, a watchdog with separate output and a choice of four timeout periods, and a low-line output, which gives advanced warning of impending power failure. The ICs have an ambient operating temperature ranging from -40 degrees C to 85 degrees C. National claims that the ICs are immune to short-voltage transients.

“National's EEPROM technology gives customers extraordinary flexibility by making it possible for them to select the precise combination of supervisory functions they need for a specific application," stated Monika Abele, National's marketing engineer of power management products. “EEPROM technology also shortens our customer's time-to-market by allowing us to factory-program a custom set of supervisory functions and deliver prototypes within two weeks."

Available now in production quantities, the LM3700 family includes 14 standard combinations and hundreds of possible factory-programmed customized versions housed in 9-bump micro SMD or MSOP-10 packages. The ICs run about $0.40 each in quantities of 1,000.