Buck regulators are three in one
01 January 2008
Integrating three packages onto a single die brings together the advantages of discrete and monolithic regulators. International Rectifier (www.irf.com) also manages to save board space with the SupIRBuck range of nine regulators in a 5mm x 6mm QFN package, which has a 9mm profile.
The thermally enhanced package allows mounting on the rear of the motherboard, accounting for the space savings in space-constrained, high-density server applications.
The initial nine devices, more will follow promises the company, in the IR38xx SupIRBuck point of load voltage regulator family put together controller-specific technology, IR’s PWM IC with its HexFET trench technology MOSFETs.
Input voltages range form 2.5V to 21V, with output from 0.6V. Three models, the IR3820A, IR3821A and IR3822A switch at 300kHz, the others are designed for output load current at 600kHz.
The scaleable common footprint buck regulators are designed for 4A,7A ad 12A, increasing by 2A for the first and last, i.e. 6A and 14A for the 300kHz versions.
As storage increases, we are now talking about GByte rather than MByte capacities, efficiency values come to the fore. SupIRBuck efficiency ranges at around 90 per cent, 95 per cent at 12V single rail operation and 10 per cent more than was previously achievable.
The various devices in the range can have OCP (over current protections) TSD (thermal shut down) and DDR tracking, where a spare pin is used for external reference to track the selected reference.
Subsequent regulators will have additional features, but the initial offering provide pre-bias start-up, hiccup current limit, thermal shutdown and precise output voltage regulation, in addition to the fixed 600kHz switching frequency.
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