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Power Management IC (PMIC)

An integrated circuit that manages the power in an electronic device or module, including any device that has a battery that gets recharged.
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Description

A power management integrated circuit (PMIC) is used to manage power on an electronic devices or in modules on devices that may have a range of voltages. The PMIC manages battery power charging and sleep modes, DC-to-DC conversion, scaling of voltages down or up, among others. Low-dropout regulators (LDO), pulse-frequency modulation (PFM), pulse-width modulation (PWM), power FETs, and real-time clocks (RTC) may be found on PMICs.

A typical PMIC contains single or multiple switching DC-to-DC converters like buck or boost converters and linear regulators like LDO. At the heart of a PMIC is the power-transistor, which is a large transistor with an area of a few square millimeters laid out as multiple banks of transistors. It is critical for these parallel devices to have very low resistance (aka RdsON) in order to minimize the power loss, heat, and achieve better power conversion efficiency.*

PMICs still use 200mm manufacturing process but are starting to use 300mm. Some PMICs are being produced on panel-level fan-out packaging.

*Source: “Better PMIC Design Using Multi-Physics Simulation” by Karthik Srinivasan, Ansys-Apache, 2016.