High Efficiency PMIC nPM1300 Evaluation Kit Experience

Nordic is headquartered in Norway and has Bluetooth, ANT+, Thread, Zigbee, WiFi, and NB-IoT technologies. Nordic’s low-power Bluetooth SoCs are widely used in the IoT field due to their high performance and ease of design, including wireless PC peripherals, gaming, sports and fitness, mobile accessories, consumer electronics, toys, healthcare, and automation products. Although many SoCs have integrated power management functions, due to limitations in power consumption, efficiency, charge and discharge management, many users still need external power management chips to meet complex functional requirements. Common power management chip architectures are usually relatively simple, generally supporting multiple adjustable voltage outputs and supporting external batteries for charge and discharge management.

• Hardware reset required in abnormal situations
• Longer battery life
• Accurate battery capacity statistics
• Fast and safe charge and discharge
• Smaller size and higher efficiency

• nPM1300 core chip, QFN32 package, all pins are routed through standard 2.54mm pitch headers for flexible evaluation and measurement
• 1 SHPHLD button, 3 GPIO tactile buttons, 3 LED indicators
• Supports two battery interfaces, with and without NTC
• The main control chip is nRF5340, connected to the host computer via USB serial port, and configures the nPM1300 registers through IIC communication
• Two USB-C interfaces, one connects to nRF5340 as USB serial function, the other connects directly to nPM1300
• Multiple voltage test points for easy connection with oscilloscopes and multimeters
• An external expansion interface can be used to connect a matching power meter expansion board

• DC-DC BUCK converter
• Battery charge and discharge management section
• GPIO and LED driving section
• Digital interface bus section
• Load switch section

• Two ultra-efficient DC-DC buck outputs, adjustable from 1.0-3.3v, maximum 200mA output
• 32-800mA adjustable charging current, step size 2mA, supports NTC input, output voltage from 3.5v to 4.45v
• No limit on battery capacity, supports lithium-ion, lithium polymer, and lithium iron phosphate batteries
• Two 100mA load switches or 50mA LDO, supporting voltage from 1.0-3.3v
• Supports USB Type-C interface, CC pins can be directly connected to chip pins, with built-in 5.1k pull-down resistor, no external configuration needed
• Input voltage 4.0-5.5v, maximum 1.5A, 22v overvoltage protection
• 5 configurable GPIOs, 3 configurable LED outputs
• Fully compatible I2C TWI digital bus interface, supporting speeds up to 400KHz
• Manufactured with 180nm technology, operating temperature range -40℃ to 85℃, PN junction temperature less than 125℃
• Two hardware resets, watchdog timer, wake-up timer, general-purpose timer
• 10-bit precision ADC to measure input voltage, battery voltage, current, and chip temperature
• Supports power statistics function, sampling battery voltage, current, and temperature values through internal ADC, and can accurately perform power statistics through the official algorithm
• Overvoltage, undervoltage, overcurrent protection, temperature protection
• Ultra-small package size: 3.1×2.4 mm WLCSP and 5.0×5.0 mm QFN
• Requires only 5 passive components for use
• Supports ultra-low power transport mode, with a static current of 370nA in factory mode
• Graphical interface configuration, one-click export of configuration to the user’s MCU application

• Wearable devices
• Handheld entertainment devices
• Portable medical equipment
• Rechargeable smart home sensors
• Mouse, keyboard, touchpad
• Body sensing games and other interactive entertainment devices
• Low-power sensors and other IoT devices

• 1 charging management chip
• 2 BUCK buck chips
• 2 load switch chips
• 1 power meter chip
• 1 watchdog chip
• 1 hardware reset chip

14:52:40.188    Device Connected SN:EE177EE0F1D0259B14:52:40.189    Getting serialport options from persistent store EE177EE0F1D0259B.pc-nrfconnect-npm14:52:40.190    Device Connected SN:null14:53:45.467    Selected device with s/n EE177EE0F1D0259B14:53:45.478    Opened port with options: {"path":"COM4","baudRate":115200}14:53:45.575    Closed port: COM414:53:45.575    Device setup ready for device with s/n EE177EE0F1D0259B14:53:45.581    Opened port with options: {"path":"COM4","baudRate":115200}14:53:47.831    Reset cause: SWRESET

• DASHBOARD: Overall configuration of nPM1300 chip
• CHARGER: Battery charging current and voltage configuration
• REGULATORS: DC-DC converter and load switch configuration
• GPIOS: Configuration of 5 GPIOs and 3 GPIOs
• SYSTEM FEATURES: Configuration of system reset, timer, POR, input current, etc.
• PROFILES: Battery model creation and loading
• GRAPH: Real-time curves of battery voltage, current, and temperature

This will enable the internal pull-up for the I2C line, where 27 and 26 values specify the SDA and SCL pin numbers used by the SoC.

The supporting materials for the evaluation kit are very comprehensive, making it almost ready to use for developers, mainly including:

This article introduces the characteristics of the nPM1300 power management chip and briefly experiences the basic functions of the evaluation kit and the basic use of the graphical configuration interface. During the use process, it can be found that this chip is very simple and easy to use, almost without the need to read the data manual or write code to apply it in the project. It should be noted that the nPM1300 cannot be used independently and requires an MCU host for configuration and control through the I2C interface. The recommended typical application is to use it with nRF52 and nRF53 series SoCs, but it can also be used on other non-Nordic chips.

Overall, the high integration of nPM1300 greatly reduces the user’s workload. Its ultra-low power consumption and ultra-high efficiency are the advantages of this chip, making it very suitable for low-power IoT devices that do not require high current.