Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation announced that its first power management products, the UltraCMOS-based Point-of-Load (POL) DC-DC Buck Regulators with integrated switches, are available for sampling. The trio of radiation-hardened highly integrated devices, PE99151, PE99153 and PE99155 -- which are the company's initial offering in the power management arena -- benefit from inherent advantages brought by Peregrine's CMOS-on-sapphire technology and the company's decades-long experience with high-reliability space applications.

The new PE9915x POL DC-DC synchronous buck regulators are believed by Peregrine to be the industry's smallest space-grade monolithic non-isolated distributed power solution, replacing traditional multi-chip modules that power field-programmable gate array (FPGA), digital signal processor (DSP), ASIC and SRAM power management designs. The combination of small size, high levels of integration and efficiency lowers total system weight and associated costs. Attributes including Single Event Effects (SEE) immunity to a Linear Energy Transfer (LET) greater than 90 MeV*cm(2)/mg and radiation hardness of greater than 100 KRad (total dose tolerance) make the UltraCMOS POL DC-DC buck regulators well-suited for space, defense and commercial/industrial applications such as space systems, military radios, radar, engine control module (ECM), down hole drilling and other high-reliability systems.

"This is a natural evolution for the Peregrine portfolio based on the success of our rad-hard switches, frequency synthesizers and prescalers in the demanding high-reliability market," said Dave Shepard, vice president and general manager for Peregrine's High Performance Solutions business unit. "Peregrine continues to develop products for the high-reliability markets leveraging its 'Rad Hard by Process' approach, simplifying the design and improving the overall environmental performance," Shepard added.

The new PE9915x devices are designed to operate from a wide 5V bus rail and provide an output voltage of 1.0V to 3.6V supply rails for analog, digital and RF payloads while delivering up to 2A, 6A or 10A of continuous output current. The devices operate over an input voltage range of 4.6V to 6V with a switching frequency range from 100 kHz to 5 MHz, achieving high peak efficiency of greater than 93% through monolithic integration by reducing switch loss. Additionally, the internal oscillator operates at 500 kHz or 1 MHz allowing designers to trade-off between peak efficiency and external components size.

"There are several features in our new POL DC-DC buck regulators that provide design flexibility to engineers, which is important when making decisions and trade-offs for optimized system performance," stated Anup Singh, product manager for Peregrine's high-reliability product line.

Another feature of the PE9915x devices is an external resistor which provides adjustable slope compensation to optimize closed loop bandwidth across output voltage and switching frequency range. Loop compensation is externally adjustable to meet preferred gain/phase margin and application transient response while still maintaining stability of the overall design.

Complex start-up conditions and sequencing requirements are addressed simply with the PE9915x soft-start function and the integrated power-good-enable feature. The adjustable soft-start feature controls the rate of load ramp and allows limitation for both the output voltage ramp rate as well as the inrush current rate. If higher output current is needed, two or more devices rated at the same output current and operating at the same frequency may be connected in a parallel configuration to enable a technique known as current sharing. An internal under voltage lockout (UVLO) feature prevents the PE9915x devices from powering up before input voltage rises above the UVLO threshold limit.

The PE99151, PE99153 and PE99155, offered as die or in the small 32-lead ceramic QFP package, are sampling now with flight parts available in July 2012. Pricing is provided through Peregrine's worldwide sales management; an export license is required to ship these parts outside the United States.