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San
Jose, CA -- January 22, 2004 -- Summit
Microelectronics has announced that its
SMM665
six-channel ultra-precise voltage
controller
has won the Analog Zone
(www.analogzone.com)
2003 award for "the Best Engineered Power
Controller." The annual award program recognizes
outstanding products introduced in a given year.
Summit is the only privately held company among the
eight recognized in the "Power Management
Technology" category. The others include Linear
Technology, Intersil, Analog Devices, ST
Microelectronics and Siliconix.
Paul McGoldrick, AnalogZONE editor-in-chief,
said "To achieve Product of the Year honors, the
chosen product must be a standout in its class,
possessing exceptional technical merit as well as
well-targeted marketability." He commented on
Summit's award, saying, "The SMM665 is one of those
few products which will fascinate the analog
engineer because of the sheer accuracy of the
voltage settings it achieves. Beyond accuracy,
sequencing and margining of supplies is becoming
more and more critical in multi-voltage
ASICs/processors/DSPs. The SMM665 can be sequenced
in any order and in different ways and achieves
highly-accurate margining voltage. The company has
carefully listened to potential end users in a
myriad of applications, and the decision to offer a
factory pre-programming service is a strong
additional lure."
The SMM665 has raised the bar on precision analog
performance with Summit's new innovation called
Active DC Output
Control (ADOC) to intelligently maintain the
output voltage of up to six DC/DC converters on the
user's board with dramatically improved accuracy in
system use &emdash; typically +/-0.1% of voltage
output, and guaranteed to +/-0.2%. This is an order
of magnitude improvement over existing solutions
that are typically several percent innacurate. The
SMM665 is rapidly gaining acceptance at a number of
enterprise equipment makers &emdash; and not only
because of its high voltage accuracy.
ABOUT THE
SMM665
The
SMM665 brings a highly-integrated suite of
solutions that addresses critical power management
requirements. This includes the higher accuracy
DC/DC supply voltage increasingly demanded in
high-performance processors, FPGAs and ASICs. This
demand will be ever more critical as semiconductor
feature size decreases. The allowable error can be
as low as 10-15mV for state-of-the-art devices. The
innovation embedded in the SMM665 meets these
stringent standards.
The
SMM665 is also a highly optimized controller with
true cascaded sequencing capability so that
the user can turn on up to six DC/DC power supplies
in any order to accommodate the varied requirements
of high-performance load devices. The ramp of a
given supply voltage is not started until the prior
voltage has reached it's threshold voltage level.
This eliminates the risk of a voltage ramping up
out of sequence because the prior voltage has not
responded due to loadings problems or other
difficulties. That risk is present in devices that
are called sequencers, but which actually just
blindly time the turnon of various voltage
supplies.
In addition, the SMM665 is a precision
marginer. Voltage margining is rapidly
becoming recognized to have great value as
equipment makers strive to improve the reliability
of the product that they ship to customers.
Precision margining lets the manufacturer verify
each electronic board in production and weed out
those with marginal component interactions. This is
done by varying the voltage supply "rails" on the
board to find sensitivities that predict
longer-term reliability problems and field failure.
The high-accuracy capability of the SMM665
effectively implements margining &emdash; unlike
other margining controllers with as much as 10% or
more innacuracy that negates the advantages of
performing margining in the first place.
PROGRAMMABLE
ANALOG FOR A DIGITAL WORLD
Summit's products are programmable. They provide
the user with a rich set of configuration options
to optimize them for particular applications.
They're platform solutions because a given
user typically designs ICs like the Summit SMM665
into a number of sockets, often dozens, across
their equipment product lines. In each socket, they
rapidly tailor the product to the needs of that
socket using a high-level GUI supplied by
Summit.
Once a user completes design and prototyping, the
GUI automatically generates a hexadecimal data file
that can be sent to Summit for review and approval.
Summit then assigns a unique customer
identification code to the file and programs the
customer's production devices prior to production
final electrical test. This ensures that the device
will operate properly in the end application. The
design kit software can be downloaded today from
Summit's website at www.summitmicro.com.
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ABOUT
SUMMIT MICROELECTRONICS
Summit Microelectronics supplies semiconductors
that provide precision analog control for a variety
of end equipment, from server and storage and
networking, to handheld battery-operated units.
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