Turnkey power solution for Atmel ARM Cortex A5 & ARM9 eMPUs

Critical in conserving battery life in portable applications, these highly integrated turnkey power IC solutions reduce cycle-time up to 80% and enable the lowest standby power (under 2mW).

Jacko Wilbrink, Senior Product Marketing Director of ARM eMPU & Secure at Atmel, comments: “Working with Active-Semi to develop the ACT8865 and ACT8945A Family of PMICs has helped to further simplify our customer’s system design and reduce the number of power components by as much as 80 percent. This approach supports our efforts to decrease the embedded processor platform solution size while increasing the reliability.”

Integrating the complete voltage regulator requirements of Atmel eMPU-based systems, the ACT8865 and ACT8945A from Active-Semi include 3 step-down DC-DC converters and 2 low-dropout linear regulators while leaving free 2 additional LDO for auxiliary customer-specific functions. Removing the associated design complexity of discrete solution alternatives, these PMICs also include pre-configured power rail sequencing. In order to efficiently manage battery charging, the ACT8945A also offers an integrated battery charger and ActivePath power path management. Both products offer serial communication interfaces to configure and control the operation of the PMICs.

“We see tremendous market opportunity for high density and energy efficient microprocessors such as Atmel’s SAMA5 and SAM9 that are enabling a new class of consumer and industrial embedded applications. Our ACT8865 and ACT8945A devices have proven valuable as they enable up to a 50% reduction in both size and total cost of the power solution but at higher performance than the discrete alternatives,” commented Mark Cieri, Vice President of Sales and Marketing at Active-Semi.

ACT8865 and ACT8945A are in production today.