2017-11-10

Learn how to use the ISL28025 digital power monitor to monitor input current of the digital point of load regulator using PowerNavigator.

Transcript

What is a Digital Power Monitor, or DPM?

Hi, my name is Justin Heisig. Today I'll be showing you how to use the ISL28025 digital power monitor to monitor the input current of a system of digital point of load regulators. This can be illustrated with our PowerNavigator software which is currently shown here. So let's get started.

To make things easily visible, I've changed the monitor view from a large vertical to small horizontal. To do that, we click this gear icon and here is large view vertical. Let's see what that looks like. As you can see, it's hard to view all of the monitors at the same time. You'd have to scroll left and right. So to view them all at one time, we click the small view horizontal, and I've also unchecked some of these boxes here to remove some unnecessary items. So now we can see all the rails at once.

Currently, there are no loads active in our chain and the input current is a 150mA. So as we turn on some of these output rails, the load on the input is going to increase. So let's do that. Let's turn on the first output rail, the ZL8801. As you can see, our input current jumped up to 540mA. So let's continue to do this down the line and see how our input current varies.

So by turning on the 8800 outputs, we can see our input current jumped up to 1.3A. So let's turn on the 68200. We can see our input current is now 1.34A. And finally the 8802, the input current of the entire system is now 1.86A.