Lattice Platform Manager Chosen Product Of The Year

Product of the Year recognition from Electronic Products is among the most prestigious and fiercely contested awards in the electronics industry. The award is held in such high regard due in part to the longevity of the competition (2010 marks the 35th annual Product of the Year awards) and its selectivity: the editors of Electronic Products evaluated thousands of products launched in 2010 and judged them against three criteria:

 A significant advancement in a technology or its application
 Innovative design
 A substantial achievement in price/performance

The Platform Manager device provides board-specific power and digital management functions using dedicated programmable circuits, and had to best some 300 entrants in its category to become one of the few very select winners. “The editors of Electronic Products are very impressed with the flexibility of the Platform Manager device, and its ability to provide a single integrated design solution for a board’s digital and power functions,” said Senior Editor Paul O’Shea. “It makes a designer’s task easier and helps standardize the product across multiple platforms.”

The 2010 Product of the Year Awards were announced in the January 2011 issue of Electronic Products with a cover feature and a brief description of each product. Additionally, the winning products appear on Electronic Products’ website

We are honored that our Platform Manager device has been chosen as Product of the Year by Electronic Products,” said Chris Fanning, Lattice Corporate Vice President and General Manager of Low Density and Mixed Signal Solutions. “One Platform Manager device replaces multiple discrete board components by integrating programmable analog and logic to support many common board functions such as power management, digital housekeeping and glue logic, which simplifies board design. This enables board designers to reduce cost, shrink board space, improve reliability and reduce the risk of board re-spins. The Platform Manager device is a simple and elegant solution to the growing complexity of board management functions.”

Transforming Board Management Design with Platform Manager Devices

Modern circuit boards use devices such as CPUs, FPGAs and ASICs to perform the primary processing functions. These primary function devices require multiple board-mounted power supplies that need to be turned on and off in a specific sequence, monitored for faults and trimmed for voltage accuracy. In addition, the input power to the board often requires redundant power management and, in the case of plug-in boards, hot-swap functionality. All the functions that control various power rails are collectively called power management. After all supplies are turned on, the system requires digital support functions such as reset distribution, start-up configuration control for FPGAs and ASSPs, watchdog timers and a system bus interface for a microcontroller. Lattice’s new Platform Manager family provides a single-chip solution that integrates all of these power and digital management functions.

The programmable Platform Manager device, with its ability to integrate both power management and digital management functions, reduces the number of board components, saving time and board area, and reducing design risk. The traditional methods of designing with a collection of unique single-function ICs for power management, and complex design partitioning across multiple programmable devices for digital support functions, are simply replaced by the single chip Platform Manager device. It is anticipated that in many cases the Platform Manager device can cut the bill-of-material cost by 50%.

When implemented correctly, board power management can dramatically improve system reliability, because when operation under abnormal or faulty conditions is prevented, damage to components and corruption of system memory is avoided. With the traditional approach to power management, designers often reduce the number of supplies monitored, the speed of response to errors and the accuracy of monitoring in order to meet cost targets, compromising board reliability. The Platform Manager device avoids this compromise with its low cost and ability to monitor up to 12 rails with 0.7% accuracy and a <65uS response to power supply faults.

In addition, the Platform Manager device provides several benefits compared to traditional design methodology, such as increased flexibility, on-board reprogrammability and software-based design and simulation. In those cases where these benefits help to avoid a board re-spin, weeks or even months can be saved from the project schedule.