News

Silego Announces New SLG46580 Flexible Power Island to Improve PMIC Functionality

June 06, 2017 by Kate Smith

This News Brief covers Silego's new flexible power island device, announced today.

This News Brief covers Silego's new flexible power island device, the SLG46580.

Silego announced today that it's expanding its GreenPAK (GPAK) family of programmable mixed-signal ICs (CMICs).

The GreenPAK Family

Silego announced the GreenPAK (GPAK) in 2009 as a one-time programmable micro-FPGA. Since then, the GreenPAK family has grown considerably.

 

The SLG4DVK1 GreenPAK dev kit

 

The fact that many of their customers were using GreenPAK devices in power systems (power gating, monitoring, sequencing, etc.) told Silego that they needed to provide new devices that are at least somewhat optimized for power systems. This is where the new flexible power islands come into play.

In November of last year, Silego announced the SLG46125, the predecessor to the SLG46580 announced today.

Flexible Power Islands (FPIs)

The term "Flexible Power Islands" is unique to Silego. The core concept is that an FPI can help a designer divide up a power system into small "islands" of power regions that can be spread across a system.

AAC had a conversation with Silego's Director of Marketing, Nathan John, who shed some light on the motivation behind designing FPIs. "Everyone wants to add new sensors to devices," John said, "but they often put them on the edge of (an existing) board. It can be difficult to route power to support them." 

The standard solution up to this point has been the use of a PMIC (power management IC), but the new flexible power islands aim to augment or replace the PMIC structure for more flexibility, programmability, and differentiation.

 

Representation of an SLG46580 FPI in a small consumer electronic device. Image courtesy of Silego.

 

John stressed that the goal is to increase the flexibility designers have when adding features to portable devices. Silego designed the FPIs with mobile phones and wearables in mind to accommodate the need for increased battery life without increasing the size of the end device.

Key Features/ Specs

  • Small 2x3mm, 20-pin package (compared to a typical PMIC, which measures around 4x4 or 5x5mm)
  • Four 150mA LDO regulators
    • Set programmable output voltages ranging from 0.9V to 4.35V
    • Programmable options for slew-rate selection and fault detection
  • Compatible with the GPAK Designer GUI and development hardware