Special-Interest Group Aims to Define PMBus

A special interest group currently is being formed to define the specification for the “Power Management Bus” or PMBus, a communications protocol meant to facilitate digital power management over the popular I²C serial bus. The PMBus initiative, which was first announced in October by a coalition of semiconductor and power supply vendors, is intended to be an open standard that will encourage development and adoption of digital power management.

Open to all interested parties, the special interest group will allow participants to view the preliminary specification being developed and comment on it. The finalized PMBus specification (rev. 1.0) will then be unveiled to the general power electronics community at the upcoming Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC), which will run March 7-10 in Austin, Texas.

According to Todd Hendrix, vice president of Worldwide Marketing and Business Development at Artesyn Technologies—founder of the PMBus coalition—PMBus is truly meant to be an open standard and will not require any licensing of IP. In that respect, the PMBus special interest group is being modeled on another successful effort, that of the SMBus special interest group, which established that standard.