Chipus Annouces new power management IP for hearables and wearables

Florianópolis, Brazil — September 24, 2020 -- If you have been following previous posts and events from Chipus, you have heard the concepts for our power management IP (PMIP) for hearables and wearables. If you are arriving now, welcome! We will show you a short summary.

In order to come up with a successful product in the growing hearables/wearable market, the user experience is the most important aspect! We, as engineers, are supposed to solve problems to create a great end-user experience. This is key to successful products and this is the first premise that Chipus used to create this IP.

From this first premise, we can infer that these products must be comfortable and small, right? Nobody enjoys big, bulky and heavy devices :p

Assuming the devices must be light and small, we, as engineers, know that:

1. Batteries will be small: small batteries demand ultra-low power circuits as we want to extend the lifetime as much as possible. Remember the user experience premise! Every nA matters here!
2. PCBs will also be small: we will not have much room to accommodate lots of components inside the earbud or smartwatch. This simple logic brings us the following conclusions about the electronics:
   1. Generations will see more and more integration towards ASICs. In such high volume consumer products, the industry will squeeze the margin as much as possible and ASICs seems to be a good approach.
   2. We, as engineers, must avoid using bulky passives as much as possible because the PCB just can not handle them!

Given the reasoning above, Chipus presents a power management unit capable of enabling successful new products.

Chipus IP was conceived with strong focus on the applications and features:

• Configurable battery charger: based on Chipus previous experience and proven battery chargers. Chipus has been working with battery chargers from several years and we have developed a family of chargers!
• Integrated battery fuel gauge: providing periodic measurement of battery conditions. We are making this very low power. Don’t worry
• Always-on ULP power management unit: to enable ultra-low power housekeeping by the digital core. This entire PMU consumes less than 500nA (references, LDOs and POR)!
• Temperature sensor: very useful in every IoT-like application. Information can be provided to user or used to adjust circuitry dynamically.
• SIMO DC/DC converter: using only one inductor, this step-down DC/DC provides efficient supply voltage from battery to the digital core, RF and analog peripherals (microphone, speaker, LEDs, etc)
• ULP configurable LDOs: they can be used to power islands of digital circuits such as SRAM. Configurable outputs!

The IP was be designed to be extensible and customizable to several applications. We present here only our standard version. Our goal was to make the life of system architects easier by delivering flexible power management capabilities.

Talk to us about your exact requirements! Our technical team will be glad to discuss how we can solve your challenge.