A System-oriented Approach to Board-level Power Management:

An alternative is to tackle the design problem with a top-down, requirements-driven approach. Instead of trying to design the board's power management functions around one or more fixed-function ICs, the designer defines the system in terms of individual physical and logical functions, and allows those to drive the design. Designing in this way requires a radical departure in design philosophy, where much of the system's control logic is shifted from hardware into firmware or software. The advantages, however, include lower component count, lower system cost and more flexibility in accommodating unforeseen requirements.

This article describes an example of this system-oriented approach applied to CompactPCI (cPCI) board-level power management, including hot swap capability. It is presented as a pdf file (no registration required). To see the article, click here.

About the author
Sunil Deep Maheshwari is working as Design Engineer at Freescale Semiconductor for nearly three years. He has worked on architectures ranging from Digital Signal Controller, Power Train to Metering. He earned his Bachelor Degree in Engineering in Electronics and Communications from NSIT, Delhi University, India.