Intersil Bows Buck-Boost Regulator for Energy-Efficient Wearables
Intersil, a supplier of power management components, introduced the ISL9120, a buck-boost switching regulator that enables more energy-efficient operation of wearables and other small-footprint IoT devices, the company said in a Monday announcement. “With the pervasiveness of mobile devices and…
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growing popularity of wearables, power designers are challenged to balance cost, form factor and power efficiency,” the company said. Power for wearables typically requires three DC-DC regulators and 3-5 low-dropout (LDO) regulators, it said. But LDOs take up “valuable board space” and “lack the high efficiency and reliability of a buck-boost regulator, sacrificing performance,” such as memory resets, application shutdowns and other glitches, it said. Using the ISL9120 instead eliminates these problems, it said. And since the ISL9120 requires only a single inductor and comes in a small 1.41mm x 1.41mm package, “designers no longer have to compromise efficiency or form factor,” it said.