During this video, I will introduce the wide range use cases for high performance processing platform for a quick system overview, and showing how the innovation in applications trigger more requirements for high performance processor and TI’s strong portfolio in industrial market. Then we will deep dive in the power requirements from two aspects: the typical requirements for each power rail and what we should care about for power sequencing.

Embedded processors and FPGAs play a key role for the next generation of industry 4.0 and Internet-of-thing applications, and you can see the use cases in every area, such as human machine interface, robotics, smart appliances, building controls, machine vision and connectivity.  And of course the coming artificial intelligence.

High performance and reliable processing system has critical requirements for power supply. For the power tree of a typical processing system, it would looks like as the example shown in this page. It has distinct DC power rails to support the core, MPU, internal buffer, analog units, external I/O, DDR, eMMC and wireless network.

For each power rails, what we should care about is listed at the left side of this page: the critical voltage regulation, high efficiency over wide load, small occupied space and optimized PCB layout.

For processors, a well-regulated power supply with optimized transient response is critical for proper operation and reliability. Too high voltage will cause the processor permanently damaged and too low voltage will cause the processor go into a brown out or UVLO condition and resulting in lost or corrupted data. High efficiency over wide load is also important, especially at light load, enabling the suspend mode in the system with lower standby power consumption, such as the screen with 10% backlight displaying the time of the day. And optimized PCB layout and compact occupied space for power tree is also big concern for a high integrated platform.

Besides, another critical requirement is power sequencing, strict power up and power down sequencing is shown in the image, improper power sequencing can cause reliability problems, such as characteristics degradation, inrush current and latch-up.