Learn how you can use PowerMap and Rail Inspector features. PowerMap adds more real-time information to the power rail blocks, such as device name, phase count, output voltage, output current, PMBus addresses, and current sharing capability. This additional information helps users more quickly visualize their system. Rail Inspector quickly guides users through the power supply parameters set up.
Transcript
Hi, my name is Brandon Howell and I handle Technical Marketing with Intersil's Digital Power Products. Today, we're gonna be talking about PowerNavigator, specifically the new and improved PowerNavigator PowerMap. To help me demonstrate that, I've got several of our demo boards connected to my PC here. I have a ZL6105 single phase demo board, a ZL8800, this is a dual output controller, a ZL8801, this is a dual phase controller. They're all connected, all of the PMBus interfaces are tied together and then I have a white PMBus to a USB adapter, which plugs into my PC here, and I'm able to use PowerNavigator to communicate with these devices.
So I'm gonna go ahead and launch PowerNavigator. So, as that comes up, the first thing that PowerNavigator does, it goes out, it scans the bus, and it detects any hardware that I have connected. So it's found my three demo boards, what show up on the left hand side here. I'm gonna hit Start. And when I hit Start that brings me to the PowerNavigator home page here. So on the PowerNavigator home page, right in the center is our new and improved PowerMap. So, the PowerMap, in this version of PowerNavigator, has more information than we've shown in previous versions.
It also adds a zoom feature. So if I zoom in on one of the controllers here, this is the ZL6105. The new PowerMap, it tells me what the device is, how many phases there are, what the current output voltage is, what the current load current is. It has a rail name. I can actually change these rail names to make them more descriptive. Over here it shows me the address that it's at. So this one's at a PMBus address of 18. It also shows me that this device allows current share. So in this case I can current share up to four different ZL6105s to make a four-phase application.
If I zoom back out to my PowerMap here, I can also add loads. So the whole idea of the PowerMap is to be a visual representation of your system. So I've just added in a load from my part library here. If I double click on that I can actually make the load have multiple inputs. As an example, if this was an ASIC in a typical user system, usually an ASIC has multiple inputs, not just one, you know, sometimes three up to four, sometimes more inputs. In this case, I've added three inputs, I can add another rail, maybe this will be my auxiliary rail. I'll put this one down here, this is my load for that.
If I right click on the PowerMap, I can tell it's auto-wired all of these lines. So I've gone ahead and I've auto-wired everything. So now I've got a nice visual representation of what my actual system looks like. It just makes using the GUI a lot easier, because at a glance I can tell what exactly what rail is powering what, what rail I'm communicating with, and those are just some of the new features of the new PowerMap.
The last thing is with the new PowerMap, if I double click on one of these devices, I bring up something we call the Rail Inspector. The Rail Inspector is how we go through and actually configure these devices. So with Rail Inspector, I can configure my output voltage, my input voltage, my load current, all my fault settings, my switching frequency. All that can be configured with this new Rail Inspector. I can save, I can load configuration files. It just makes interfacing with all the devices a lot easier.
So that's a quick overview of our PowerMap and Rail Inspector tools. For more more information, please visit the PowerNavigator page on our website.