The LP876242-Q1 device is designed to meet the power management requirements of the latest processors and platforms in various safety-relevant automotive and industrial applications. The device has four step-down DC/DC converter cores, generating four 1-phase outputs. The device settings can be changed by I2C-compatible serial interface or by a SPI serial interface.

The switching clock is forced to PWM mode and the phases are interleaved. The switching can be synchronized to an external clock and spread-spectrum mode can be enabled to minimize the disturbances.

The LP876242-Q1 device is a power-management integrated circuit (PMIC), available in a 32-pin, 0.5-mm pitch, 5.5-mm × 5-mm QFN HotRod package. The device is designed for powering embedded systems or system on chip (SoC) in Automotive or Industrial applications. All buck converters have the capability to sink up to 1 A, and support dynamic voltage scaling. Double buffered voltage scaling registers enable each BUCK to transition to different voltages during operation by SPI, I2C or state transition. A DPLL enables the BUCK converters to synchronizing to an external clock input, with phase delays between the output rails.

Two I2C interface channels or one SPI channel can be used to configure the power rails and the power state of the LP876242-Q1 device. I2C channel 1 (I2C1) is the main channel with access to the registers that control the configurable power sequencer, the states and the outputs of power rails, and the device operating states.

I2C channel 2 (I2C2), which is available through GPIO2 and GPIO3 pins, is dedicated for accessing the Q&A Watchdog communication registers. When the SPI is configured instead of the two I2C interfaces, the SPI can access all of the registers, including the Q&A Watchdog registers. An NVM option is available to enable I2C1 to access all of the registers as well, including the Q&A Watchdog registers.

LP876242-Q1 device has ten GPIOs each with multiple functions and configurable features. All of the GPIOs, when configured as a general-purpose output pin, can be included in the power-up and power-down sequence and used as enable signals for external resources. In addition, each GPIO can be configured as a wake-up input or a sleep mode trigger. The default configuration of the GPIO port comes from the NVM memory, and can be re-configured by software if the external connection permits.

The LP876242-Q1 device includes a Q&A watchdog to monitor software lockup, and a system error monitoring input (nERR_MCU) with fault injection option to monitor the lock-step signal of the attached MCU. The device includes protection and diagnostic mechanisms such as short-circuit protection, thermal monitoring and shutdown. The PMIC can notify the processor of these events through the interrupt signal, allowing the processor to act in response.