Artesyn Technologies Inc. (Boca Raton, FL), a leader in power conversion solutions for the communications industry, and Astec Power (Carlsbad, CA), a business of Emerson (St. Louis, MO), jointly announced that they have formed a coalition of leading power supply and semiconductor manufacturers that have agreed to develop and support a new communications standard defining an open architecture for power systems control. The digital protocol, referred to as “Power Management Bus” or PMBus™, will be implemented over the industry-standard I2C serial bus.
The founding group is composed of a core set of enabling companies from both the power supply and semiconductor industries. In addition to the power supply manufacturers, semiconductor participants include Intersil Corp., Microchip Technology Inc., Texas Instruments, Volterra Semiconductor, Summit Microelectronics and Zilker Labs Inc.
The PMbus digital protocol will encourage continued product innovation by removing a primary barrier; lack of a communications standard. At the same time, it increases the opportunity for differentiation of power conversion products based on features, performance and size. The protocol is scalable, initially allowing for the control of more than 100 converters. Additionally, its flexibility eliminates the need for mandatory control ICs and/or proprietary communications software interfaces.
The first revision of the PMbus digital protocol specification is now in the final stages of completion. The details will be released within the next 45 days. At that point, it will be circulated to the industry for review and further comments. An overview of the new power management protocol was recently presented at the Darnell Group’s Digital Power Forum 2004 held in San Jose, CA, September 13-15, 2004, in a white paper by Artesyn Research and Development Group Staff Engineer Robert White.
