With advances in infotainment and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), the development and expansion of semi-autonomous and autonomous driving is rapidly approaching. With HD video, control of satellite and wireless broadcasts, GPS and mobile device connectivity, and backup cameras, systems once reserved for high-end vehicles are becoming more commonplace. 

However, this performance does not come for free. As performance and processing requirements increase, whether the system is based on TI's "Jacinto 6" or on the TDAx SoC family, system-on-a-chip (SoC) power requirements also increase, both in terms of the number of power rails and current requirements. One way to manage these increased power requirements is to use integrated power management ICs (PMICs). 

In these systems, the low-voltage PMIC is powered by a pre-regulated 3.3V or 5V input. It has all the power rails needed to power the system's low-voltage power rails: processor cores, graphics cores, DDR memory, I/O devices, and analog power devices such as phase-locked loops (PLLs) and physical layers. Using one IC instead of multiple ICs to power all of these power rails makes schematic design and layout much simpler. 

To further simplify the system solution, low-voltage PMICs such as the TPS659039-Q1 are used to integrate more than just power conditioning. Since SoCs have many power supplies, they typically have power-up and power-down sequencing requirements that must be met to ensure the reliability of the SoC. Instead of using an external microcontroller to sequence the power rails, this low-voltage PMIC has hardware-controlled sequencing programmed into the device in its one-time programmable (OTP) memory, which contains not only power sequence information, but also boot voltage and other default states. Since different SoCs have different supply voltage and timing requirements, the same low-voltage PMIC can be used with different OTP programming to support the various SoCs used in infotainment and ADAS systems. 

The TPS659038-Q1 and TPS659039-Q1 devices are integrated power management integrated circuits (PMICs) for automotive applications. The devices provide seven configurable buck converters for memory, processor core, input-output (I/O), or LDO pre-conditioning with output currents up to 6 A. One of the configurable buck converters can be combined with another 3-A regulator to allow output currents up to 9 A. All buck converters can be synchronized to an external clock source between 1.7 Mhz and 2.7 Mhz, or to an internal fallback clock at 2.2 Mhz. The TPS659038-Q1 device contains 11 LDO regulators, while the TPS659039-Q1 device contains six externally used LDO regulators. 

These LDO regulators can be powered from the system power supply or from a pre-regulated power supply. The power-on and power-off controllers are configurable and support any power-on and power-off sequence (OTP-based.) The TPS659038-Q1 and TPS659039-Q1 devices include a 32 kHz RC oscillator for sequencing all resources during power-on and power-off. A 16 MHz crystal oscillator is also included to quickly generate a stable 32 kHz for the system when a fast start-up is required. all LDO and SMPS converters can be controlled via the SPI or l²C interface or a power request signal. In addition, voltage scaling registers allow switching power supplies to be converted to different voltages via SPI, I²C, or roof and floor control. A dedicated pin in each package can be configured as part of the power-on sequence to control external resources. General purpose input-output (GPIO) functionality is available, and two GPIOs can be configured as part of the power-on sequence to control external resources. The power request signal enables power mode control for power optimization. The device includes a general purpose (GP) sigma-delta analog-to-digital converter (ADC) with three external input channels. the TPS659038-Q1 and TPS659039-Q1 devices are available in a 13-ball x 13-ball nFBGA package with 0.8 mm pitch. 

In addition, automotive environments have stringent requirements for electromagnetic interference (EMI), the most common of which is the CISPR25 standard. To reduce EMI for multiple switch-mode power supply SMPS integrated in a single device, all SMPS are synchronized together, so they all use the same switching clock. The default switching frequency is 2.2MHz, which keeps emissions out of the AM band while keeping inductor sizes small to save board space. This switching clock can be either an input to the PMIC or an output from the PMIC to synchronize all SMPS on different ICs on the same system. this will reduce EMI emissions not only from the PMIC itself, but also from the entire system.