◈ Title : Trends of Power Management Integrated Circuits (PMICs)
◈ Speaker : Byeong-Ha Park, Ph.D. (Samsung Electronics)
◈ Date & Time : Friday, September 9, 2011 (14:00pm ~ 15:30pm)
◈ Place : LG Research Building, Room #101
◈ Host : Prof.  Bumman Kim (Tel. 2231)
◈ Abstract :  By virtue of rapid development of digital, analog, and wireless technology, many type of devices such as mobile, notebook, and digital camera, and so on, have been introduced in our life. Supplying power is the most fundamental and intrinsic functions of any electrical system. Voltage regulators, including both linear regulators and switching-mode regulators, provide such a function to convert unpredictable and unregulated supplies to stable, constant, accurate, regulated, and load-independent voltages. The input supplies are derived, for most part, from batteries, and off-line AC or DC sources, which usually exhibit significant voltage variations. Most integrated circuits including SoCs, in particular, draw power from already available DC supplies, like batteries, AC-DC converters, or DC-DC converters. The load, on the other hand, is composed of state-of-the-art application processors, digital-signal processors, modems, RF transceivers, other analog circuits which demand these power supplies to be quick, accurate, and capable of delivering high currents. Additionally portable battery-powered applications like mobile phones, tablets, and notebook computers require high power efficiency to maximally extend battery life. Portable electronics also demand these power regulators to be integrated onto a single die, with other circuits, like system house-keeping functions and the like, which present additional challenges, forcing designers to be knowledgeable in both system and integrated circuit design. Power management IC in the electrical systems includes all regulators like linear regulators and switching-mode regulators, battery management units, and all house-keeping functional blocks, and is thus changing from its traditional role of power distribution to smart management of the electrical power. While conventional power management functions were realized in terms of discrete and small scale ICs on the PCB board, recent advancement of mobile products such as smart phones and tablets has driven integration of all power management functions into a single die to support new application requirements: power conversion efficiency, power conversion spanning from the system to the circuit level, precise power regulation for continuously increasing system performance, small form factor, etc. In this talk, I will discuss market environments, the new trend of power management functions required for next generation mobile products and engineering challenges with direction to possible solutions, and finally the plan and vision in the power areas.