As automotive, AI/data centre, networking, and industrial systems quickly migrate toward 48V power architectures to improve efficiency and support higher power demands, designers need more than visibility into instantaneous voltage and current conditions. They need systems that understand energy use over time and can respond intelligently to changing power conditions. Microchip Technology announces the PAC1761 and PAC1861 families of 65V energy-aware digital power monitors that combine accumulated power-measurement insights with the necessary high-voltage measurement headroom and transient spike protection capabilities to help make 48V power architectures more efficient and resilient.
The move to 48V power architectures demands that digital power monitors have an additional operational margin of up to 65V measurement and 75V of spike protection to ensure transient survivability. The PAC1761 and PAC1861 devices add to these capabilities the intelligence to understand and react in real time to energy usage dynamics based on accumulated power measurement data.
“The industry conversation is shifting from measuring power at a single point in time to understanding and responding to energy behaviour across an entire system and its lifecycle,” said Keith Pazul, Vice President of Microchip’s mixed-signal linear business unit. “The PAC1761 and PAC1861 families are designed to help customers build better-performing and more reliable 48V systems that can measure instantaneous conditions and understand energy consumption and availability over time. These scalable, low-power solutions reduce monitoring overhead and include pin-compatible package options that improve source flexibility while reducing design risk.”
Microchip’s digital power monitoring devices feature programmable alerts for voltage, current, and power excursions, step-limit detection to identify sudden load changes, and configurable accumulated-energy thresholds that enable proactive system management based on both instantaneous and long-term power behaviour.
Target applications include automotive, AI/data centre, networking, industrial, server, telecom/Power over Ethernet (PoE), and 48V power distribution systems. The 12-bit PAC1761 and 16-bit PAC1861 options are available in VDFN-8 (similar to SOT23-8), VDFN-10, and MSOP-10 packages including automotive-orderable variants. Pin-compatible options can reduce redesign risk, shorten qualification cycles, and give customers flexibility to move between devices as requirements, availability, cost, or performance change.
Development tools
Development support includes evaluation board EV12R33A, a Python Command Line Interface (CLI) with library, Linux driver, and generic C library with multiple MCU code examples.
