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Six PMBus™ Presentations at APEC 2018 Industry Session

February 22, 2018 by Paul Shepard

Since being introduced in 2005 the PMBus™ power management protocol has been widely adopted and is the accepted standard for digital power management. Six industry veterans will be presenting during the Industry Session 20 (IS20) "PMBus Implementation and Applications Session" on Thursday, March 8, 2018 at the upcoming APEC Convention in San Antonio, TX.

System Level Benefits of PMBus Implementation Along the Entire Product Lifecycle will be presented by Kevin Parmenter, Head of NA Field Applications Engineering with Advanced Energy. The use of PMBus for diagnostics in prototyping, development, qualification, final deployment and field service leads to a significant cost savings in time and resources.

Attaining PMBus Adoption in Spaceborne Power Systems will be covered by Tim Meade, Staff Applications Engineer with Cobham Semiconductor Solutions. While the PMBus standard grows its terrestrial user base, spaceborne systems continue managing their power systems through discrete telemetry and command driven control. Highlighted will be issues and challenges that heretofore have precluded the space industry's adoption of PMBus.

Server Telemetry: Insight Into Platform & Performance with Node Manager and the PMBus Standard will be outlined by Mariusz Oriol, Senior Applications Engineer with Intel Technology Corporation. Described are the benefits and limitations of Intel's Baseboard Manager Controller (BMC) and Node Manager (NM) platforms that utilize PMBus.

PMBus Adaption Over Various Transport Protocols will be presented by Christopher Jones, Director of Product Marketing with Artesyn Embedded Technologies. Reviewed will be how PMBus commands make communicating with multi-output power supplies simple and straight forward using standard and "User Specific" commands over other protocols.

Application Profiles for Isolated and Non-Isolated DC-DC Power Modules will be covered by Oleg Volfson, Member of Technical Staff with Flex Power Modules. Device inter-operability between manufacturers and systems development software re-use is a key value proposition addressed by Application Profiles. Explained will be the command sets for isolated and non-isolated DC-DC power modules as defined by the PMBus Specification Working Group.

Leveraging App Profiles Firmware Standardization will be presented by Mike Jones, Applications Engineering Section Head for Power System Management with Linear Technology, now a part of Analog Devices. The Application Profile defines a standard set of commands that enable both shared code and a shared-use model at the PMBus interface. The sharing enables reuse at the level of basic software APIs as well as reuse of system design patterns.