09 August 2022
Category: Oscilloscopes
Pico Technology, winners of the Queen’s Award for Enterprise, 2022 have released a Power Management Bus (PMBus) decoder to their ever-expanding database of free serial decoders. The PMBus decoder tool is available in PicoScope 7 (Early Access) to decode, display and analyze smart batteries and power supplies.
PMBus is a serial communications protocol aimed at the configuration, control, and monitoring of power supply devices. It’s built on top of the proven foundation of the SMBus, which is a low-cost, two-wire bus derived from I2C.
The PMBus maintainers, System Management Interface Forum (SMIF), have a large list of early adopters from component and equipment manufacturers such as Intel, Microchip, ST, and Texas Instruments. All of which have incorporated PMBus into their products and integrated circuits. Anyone having a PicoScope as their debug tool will be able to use the decoder in a large range of power management applications.
Trevor Smith, Pico Technology’s Business Development Manager has said “Control and monitoring of power supplies is a critical factor in today's electronic designs. PMBus has emerged as the de facto standard serial protocol for management and monitoring of the status and overall health of the smart battery and embedded system AC-DC converters & DC-DC power systems. The PicoScope PMBus decoder/ analyzer enables engineers to rapidly build, debug and test their designs over the wide range of operating conditions that will be encountered when deployed in the real world. The addition of the PMBus decoder as a standard element of PicoScope 7 is another illustration of our commitment to meeting the challenges and evolving needs of embedded systems designers.”
The new PMBus serial decoder tool is now available free with PicoScope 7. To download the latest version of PicoScope 7 go to picotech.com/downloads. We have a large range of Test & Measurement PicoScopes for decoding PMBus, these are available at picotech.com/products.