PMBus presentations at APEC 2016 Industry Session

18th February 2016

System Management Interface Forum (SMIF)

Jordan Mulcare

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Since being introduced in 2005 the PMBus power management protocol has been widely adopted and is the accepted standard for digital power management. The PMBus specification working group recently released Revision 1.3 which includes enhancements while maintaining backward compatibility with the older Revision 1.2 protocol.

Two industry veterans will be presenting during the Industry Session 10 (IS10) 'From the Board to the Datacentre' at the upcoming APEC Convention in Long Beach, CA.

Travis Summerlin of Texas Instruments will present System Power Simplification Utilising PMBus Zone Capabilities and explain the new Zone Capabilities which simplify communication, control and monitoring of power conversion circuits in a large system. PMBus Revision 1.3 is based on the latest SMBus 3.0 hardware specification standard which provides for faster transactions. This industry presentation will focus on using the Zone Write and Zone Read capability to address all (or a subset thereof) a system’s devices, including any pages within those devices, in a single transaction.

Linear Technology’s Michael Jones will present PMBus on Linux: PMBus Support Options for the Linux Platform. This session will address the needs of power engineers from the perspective of design, debug and manufacturing. It will review the tradeoffs when choosing between Linux sysfs, /dev/i2c, and kernel drivers. Examples will be provided, along with comparisons using alternative 'dongles' solutions to demonstrate the impact from a software and tool perspective.