Do you ever have the feeling that two things just go together? That there is some complementarity to them that makes them really click? Maybe it’s the way your washer and dryer are arranged in your home that makes it really easy to do laundry. Or perhaps you have wireless charging built into your car and can charge your Qi-compliant phone effortlessly while you are on the go throughout the day. Things like these truly simplify our day and our lives.

As an engineer, it is no different. I want circuits to work together seamlessly. My power supply should power numerous different types of loads with few or no modifications required. I don’t want to go through pages of equations to size my inductor or output capacitor— I just want a working circuit! For those of you needing to simply power a microcontroller, and interface with its multiple sleep or hibernate modes, look no further than the TPS62177.

TPS62177 power supply solution for the TM4C123x MCU

A Cortex–M4 MCU, such as the Tiva™ C Series TM4C123x, typically has a /HIB output pin to indicate that it is operating in a very low power standby state. The TPS62177 directly accepts this as an input to its control loop, which operates it in a much lower power mode reducing the quiescent current (IQ) to just 4.8 µA. Did you catch that? It directly accepts the /HIB output without any level shifters, logic, or pull-up resistors. How is that for simple! As well, the TPS62177’s DCS-Control provides a seamless transition between its various operating modes. So, power is saved without sacrificing output voltage regulation performance. And as with almost any TPS62xxx device, the recommended output inductor and capacitor can be used for almost every application. No equations to go through! A detailed explanation of this circuit is found here.

Where can a complementary and simple power supply help out your designs?

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