As energy conservation becomes a major issue in today's world, power management is also getting more and more attention, and the improvement of technical level is constantly optimizing the energy efficiency of the system. However, in the face of concepts such as "high integration" and "digitalization", enterprises are more concerned about practical issues such as market and cost.

Power management chips have been described as the Cinderella of the semiconductor industry, which shows that power management chips have long been considered an insignificant supporting role in the semiconductor industry. However, unlike the ups and downs of the digital circuit market, power management chips have maintained a long-term, stable growth momentum. According to Databeans, global sales of power management chips exceeded $8 billion in 2007 and are expected to grow 7 percent this year. With the rising price of crude oil, the application of energy-saving field is undoubtedly to Cinderella put on the red shoes, power management applications are stepping into the foreground of the semiconductor industry.

Technological innovation promotes energy efficiency

Energy saving is the main theme of today's electronic manufacturing, and various power management chips are playing an increasingly important role in this field. Many countries use administrative measures or even legislation to encourage manufacturers to use energy-saving technologies in their products.

When it comes to energy conservation, people often think first of large factories with machines roaring. In fact, the energy consumption of information technology applications is also very impressive on a global scale. In this regard, a reporter from the China Electronics News made an image explanation: "Take the power consumption of servers that distribute millions of YouTube videos and keep the economy running, for example, its power consumption doubled between 2000 and 2005, and is likely to rise another 75% by 2010." In 2005, keeping the world's data centers online, owned by Internet giants such as Google, Microsoft and Yahoo, consumed as much electricity as 14 1 gigawatt power plants combined. Server farms in the United States alone consume enough electricity to run five of these giant power plants around the clock. In 2005, U.S. server farms consumed 1.2 percent of the nation's electricity that year. The utility bill for this energy consumption is $2.7 billion. For US server farms alone, a 1% reduction in energy consumption at this level would mean savings of $27 million per year!

Power management chip integration with caution

Although power management technology does not follow Moore's Law, the development of semiconductor manufacturing processes has also had a profound impact on power management chips. With the increasing integration of SOCs, many product processors have integrated power management functions, so that system manufacturers do not have to match the corresponding power management chip in the periphery. Therefore, there are concerns in the industry that if more and more power management functions are integrated into the processor, the market space for individual power management chips may be compressed.

Such concerns have been around for at least five years, but the market seems to be moving in the opposite direction. Recently, several companies that design MP4 and digital camera main chips are even considering separating the power management function from the main chip, and they hope that the power management chip design company can provide a power management solution to work with their main chips. "The reason they make this choice is actually very simple. "To stay ahead of the competition in the marketplace, these companies need to deliver the most feature-complete product possible, as quickly as possible." "In addition, their products are under pressure to save energy, which requires different voltages for different parts of the chip, so it takes extra time to design power management capabilities for the chip." However, this part of the design work on power management does not extend the overall functionality of the chip, so it is usually not recognized by the end user.

Digital power management is not yet mature

In the competition with digital circuits, analog circuits have lost their sphere of influence in the fields of communications, networks and smart home appliances, and only the power management position remains unchanged. However, in recent years, digital power chip products have also begun to receive attention from the industry. Some experts pointed out that: in the application of simple and easy to use, the parameter change requirement is not much, analog power products may be more advantageous, because the pertinence of its application can be achieved by hardware solidification; In complex, high-performance system applications with more controllable factors, faster real-time response, and the need for multiple analog system power management, digital power supplies have greater advantages.

However, there are still many obstacles to the large-scale promotion and application of digital power supplies, and it is still difficult to have a big breakthrough in the foreseeable future. For example, response speed or bandwidth, the digital control circuit is a sampling system, involving CPU and ADC delay issues, while the analog control response is instantaneous; Another example is the processing process, the large number of digital circuits in the digital power supply forces the use of small-size standard CMOS processes to reduce costs, and analog circuits in these processes are often difficult to achieve high performance. Therefore, high-performance digital power products are challenging to design and manufacture, and the digitization and intelligence of the power system takes a certain amount of time."