News

Silicon Labs Delivers Digital Power Development Kit

September 05, 2005 by Jeff Shepard

Silicon Laboratories Inc. (Austin, TX), a designer of mixed-signal integrated circuits, delivered its new Si8250DK development kits for the Si825x family of digital power controllers. The Si8250DK kit is a complete hardware and firmware development system that requires users to write little or no software to implement digital power supplies. The tool shortens the digital power learning curve, enabling analog engineers to rapidly implement digitally controlled power systems.

The Si8250DK supports the Si825x family of digital power supply controllers, which offer the fast response of an ASIC solution and the flexibility of a flash-based processor. The Si825x architecture delivers both digital power control and management functions while consuming one-tenth the space and drawing less than 15 percent of the supply current of typical digital signal processor solutions. The Si8250DK includes a source-level, real-time kernel that supplies key system software functions, including power supply initialization, soft-start, fault detection and recovery, PMBus™ management, and shutdown. The kit includes GUI-based Application Builder software that enables the user to design and verify system switch timing, loop compensation, and configuration without writing application software. Also included is an Integrated Development Environment that allows the user to manually adjust system parameters during power supply operation.

The Si8250DK development kit includes a Si8250 target board featuring an isolated, half-bridge current doubler rectifier; a USB to SMBus bridge board; a USB debug adapter and USB cable; two 9 V, 1.5 A universal power supplies; and the company's IDE and product information CD-ROM. The Si8250DK is available now for $199 and can be purchased online. A video demonstration of the tool kit is also available.