The System Management Interface Forum (SMIF) in conjunction with representatives from several of its member companies, will be presenting a number of papers centered around Power Management Bus (PMBus) standards and applications at this year’s Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC). The event, which is an important gathering for the global power electronics industry, will take place in Charlotte, North Carolina from March 15th to 19th. The SMIF will also use this year’s APEC as the forum at which to launch PMBus revision 1.3.1, a new and important revision to the PMBus standard.
PMBus is a protocol to support the digital management of power supplies. It is an open-standard optimized for simple, standard, flexible, extensible and easy programming. The protocol command language enables communication between the various components of a power system including CPUs, power supplies and power converters.
The seven PMBus industry sessions to be held on Tuesday, March 17th between 8.30am and 11.55am will be aimed at providing potential and existing adopters with insightful and practical information and guidance. They will cover a broad range of topics around the standard including the history and evolution of PMBus and papers on hardware and software considerations. Visitors to APEC 2015 can register to attend the sessions at: http://www.apec-conf.org/registration/. Early registration discounts are available until February 20th.
The current list of PMBus adopters and members includes many major names in the semiconductor market and electronics industry; this underlines the value of PMBus in terms of supporting the design of efficient, optimized power supply products. The current revision - 1.3 with Adaptive Voltage Scaling (AVS) – of the specification includes higher speed communication to reduce latencies, a dedicated AVS bus to statically and dynamically control processor voltages and a range of other enhancements and improvements over version 1.2.
By adopting the SMBus and PMBus standards, companies are better able to develop competitive products with broader market appeal.
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