Digital Power Demonstration

Making complex digital power product immediately accessible via web browser

Electronica 2014 sees us showing our most advanced The Bench implementation so far. It's based on Microchip’s interesting new MCP191xx products. This useful digital power family is a new class of highly integrated, mixed signal controllers with a proprietary implementation. In particular, the MCP19111 includes an analog PWM current mode controller with a stand-alone but integrated MCU core. The core application for the MCP19111 is in use as a synchronous DC/DC step down regulator. The addition of the controller allows engineers to really get creative. One potential application suiting this part is an LED based headlamp control system designed to monitor and correct for output luminance as the LED aged.

Challenges with getting to know the MCP19111

• 230 pages of detailed data sheet information
  
• Operates from 4.5 to 32V input - Combines high voltage analog and 8-bit MCU digital
• Need knowledge of: DC/DC switching techniques, Microchip's debugger (PICKIT3) and MPLAB to get started
• Requires various test gear to effectively measure performance: PSUs, DVMs and a Scope

Unique elements of this experience

• We have deployed Microchip's MPLAB on a cloud-based virtual machine.
  
• Users can now interact with a browser based environment as if they had the demo system on their own work bench.
• This enables us to remotely deliver a full out-of-the-box experience to users of this platform.
• There's simply no faster way to get started with a product of this complexity and start to understand the feature set!

Functions enabled in this experience

• Programming flexibility via MPLAB
• Input voltage programming
• Input current measurement (static)
• Output voltage measurement
• Output current measurement (static)
• Inductor current
• Input voltage regulation