PMBus Offers Open-Standard Digital Power Management

Focus:

This article presents an introduction to the Power Management Bus (PMBus), an open-standard digital power management protocol. Developed by an industry consortium of power supply and power IC vendors, this protocol was developed to remove barriers to the adoption of digital power control. It does so by standardizing the command language, transport layer, and physical interface needed for a host system to communicate with its power converters. Some of the points explained here include the origins of the PMBus transport layer in the SMBus and I2C bus, what's different about PMBus, the identity of the host and how it may vary from product development to production to in-system operation. The fundamentals of the PMBus command language are explained and example commands are discussed to illustrate how they are used.

What you’ll learn:

• How to understand the operation and benefits of the PMBus digital power management protocol

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Author & Publication:

Bob White, Staff Engineer, Artesyn Technologies, Westminster, Colo. , Power Electronics Technology, Sep 01 2005

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