Micrel Semiconductor has developed a three-zone thermal supervisor IC for thermal management using embedded thermal diodes such as those found in the Pentium III CPU

The MIC384 is part of a growing family of system and thermal management products from Micrel. Available in 8-pin MSOP and SOIC packaging, the MIC384 features one local and two remote temperature measurement zones, I2C/SMBus compatibility, a programmable interrupt output, and an address selection input.

This article was originally published on Electronicstalk on 9 February 2001 at 8.00am (UK)
Related stories

Regulator cuts light-load drain to a trickle
Synchronous buck regulator uses novel switching architecture for industry-leading light load efficiency for Li-ion battery powered systems to prolong charge life

Postamplifier has designs on fibre optic receivers
Device is easy to use in a wide variety of applications and datarates and meets the industry's most stringent jitter requirements

"The MIC384 leverages Micrel's unique ability to interface to a remote thermal diode using only a single IC pin", says Jim Judkins, Product Marketing Manager.

"It allowed us to pack more features into a smaller, lower-cost package.

Cost and space are at a premium in virtually every application today".

Judkins continues: "Micrel has created a proprietary analogue-digital convertor and signal processing front-end which can accomplish thermal diode measurements using only one wire and ground.

In fact, our testing has shown that our one-wire implementation is capable of accuracy and noise performance as good or better than competing two-wire implementations".

The MIC384's operating power supply current is a portable-friendly 0.35mA, and the quiescent current in shutdown mode is only 1.0uA.

Two package options are available.

In 1000 piece quantities, the MIC384BM in 8-pin SOIC packaging is priced at $1.54 each.

The MSOP-08 MIC384BMM is $1.66 in 1000 piece quantities.

SOIC samples are from stock.

An evaluation board will be available shortly.