News

Seminar On Using the PMBus™ Protocol Added To Darnell’s Fifth Annual Digital Power Forum

July 22, 2008 by Jeff Shepard

The Darnell Group announced that a half-day post-conference design seminar on "Using the PMBus™ Protocol" has been added to Darnell’s fifth-annual Digital Power Forum (DPF ’08) to be held September 15-17 at the Hyatt Regency, San Francisco Airport, California. This seminar will be hosted by the PMBus Organization and is offered to all DPF ’08 registered delegates.

The PMBus™ protocol has become the standard of choice for managing power conversion systems with dozens of adopters and more and more PMBus compliant products available. This seminar is for all those who are considering using the PMBus protocol in their system – the power designer including PMBus in a power converter, a system engineer for a system that will use PMBus for power management, or even the firmware engineer who is writing the code for the host system maintenance processor. This seminar is not a review of the PMBus specifications. Instead the focus is on "how to use" the PMBus in a system.

"We are excited to be working with the PMBus Organization to offer this important post-conference seminar and the expanded technical content that will be included as part of Darnell’s Digital Power Forum," stated Jeff Shepard, President of Darnell Group. "Seminar presenter, Bob White has extensive practical experience implementing digital power management in a variety of system environments. His extensive technical knowledge coupled with his practical experience will bring immense value to seminar attendees."

The seminar will start with a few basics of the PMBus such as the transport layer and command language. Next, the seminar will dive into the details of PMBus and SMBus transport layer discussing items ranging from where to put the pull-up resistors to how PMBus and I²C can be operated over the same two wires. The next set of topics address PMBus commands and how to use them for system management such as how to set and adjust the output voltage or how to program the over-current protection for a hiccup mode response. The last part of the seminar will look into the issues of programming code for a PMBus interface from the basics of handling the SMBus data protocols to handling the ALERT response. Complete information on the seminar is available at: http://www.digitalpower.darnell.com/seminar.php.

Media sponsors for Darnell’s Digital Power Forum include Darnell’s PowerPulse.Net, and the Penton Electronics Group, including: Electronic Design and Power Electronics Technology.