AEK-POW-SPSB081

The AEK-POW-SPSB081 is a power management IC evaluation board with enhanced power management functionalities, such as various standby modes to minimize power consumption with programmable local and remote wake-up capability.

The board is based on the SPSB081 power management system IC, which embeds one low-drop voltage regulator (V1) to supply the system microcontroller and another voltage regulator (V2) to be used as a voltage tracker of V1 or to supply external peripheral loads such as sensors.

V1 has a fixed rail of 5 V and features an overvoltage detection and protection solution, while V2 can work in two different ways: as a voltage tracker of V1, or as an independent voltage regulator programmable via SPI with 5 or 3.3 V.

Four high-side drivers allow supplying and driving LEDs and sensors. These high-side drivers are driven via SPI and can be configured in four different modes: OFF, ON, TIMED (with programmable time), and PWM (configurable via device registers).

Moreover, you can set the high-side driver output to be driven by the DIR pin. This functionality allows the user to generate custom PWM signals for the high-side outputs.

All outputs are short-circuit protected and detect open-load.

The communication protocol used to configure SPSB0815 registers is the SPI, implemented with four wires (MISO, MOSI, CSN, and CLK).

The AEK-POW-SPSB081 also exploits the LIN and CAN transceivers embedded in the IC, allowing the use of the board as a bridge between the microcontroller and the CAN or LIN communication lines.

An external microcontroller (for example, when using an AEK-MCU-C1MLIT1) has to refresh periodically a watchdog TRIG bit in the SPSB081 register via SPI, to maintain the device in active mode.

In case of watchdog failure, the device enters the V1_standby (for energy saving). To wake it up, send a pulse to the WU1_IN pin or just press the S1 button.

By placing a jumper on JP1, the device enters the debug mode where the watchdog is inactive.

Three demos are available in the AutoDevKit ecosystem, each of them based on a different SPC58 microcontroller evaluation board plus an AEK-POW-SPSB081.

The demos show how to use the outputs, configuring them in four different modes: OUT 1 for ON, OUT 2 for TIMED, OUT 3 for PWM and OUT 4 for DIR.

V2 is configured as a linear regulator and changes settings alternatively every 2.5 seconds between 3.3 and 5 V.

CAN connector and CAN_rx/CAN_tx pins are then connected to the microcontroller board.

The CAN test signals transmitted from the microcontroller every five seconds can be effectively decoded through CAN_H/CAN_L pins.