As automotive, AI/data centre, networking and industrial systems rapidly transition to 48V power architectures to improve efficiency and support higher power demands, designers require more than visibility into instantaneous voltage and current conditions. They also need systems that can track energy consumption over time and respond to changing power conditions. To address these requirements, Microchip Technology has introduced the PAC1761 and PAC1861 families of 65V energy-aware digital power monitors. The devices combine accumulated energy-measurement capabilities with 65V measurement headroom and transient spike protection to support efficient and resilient 48V power architectures.
The move to 48V power architectures requires digital power monitors to provide additional operating margin, including up to 65V measurement capability and 75V spike protection to ensure transient survivability. The PAC1761 and PAC1861 devices add intelligence to these capabilities, enabling real-time responses to energy-usage dynamics based on accumulated power measurement data.
“The industry conversation is shifting from measuring power at a single point in time to understanding and responding to energy behavior across an entire system and its lifecycle,” said Keith Pazul, vice president of Microchip’s mixed-signal linear business unit. “The PAC1761 and PAC1861 families are designed to help customers build better performing and more reliable 48V systems that can measure instantaneous conditions and understand energy consumption and availability over time. These scalable, low-power solutions reduce monitoring overhead and include pin-compatible package options that improve source flexibility while reducing design risk.”
Microchip’s digital power monitoring devices feature programmable alerts for voltage, current and power excursions, step-limit detection to identify sudden load changes, and configurable accumulated-energy thresholds that enable proactive system management based on both instantaneous and long-term power behavior.
Target applications include automotive, AI/data center, networking, industrial, server, telecom/Power over Ethernet (PoE) and 48V power distribution systems. The 12-bit PAC1761 and 16-bit PAC1861 options are available in VDFN-8 (similar to SOT23-8), VDFN-10 and MSOP-10 packages including automotive-orderable variants. Pin-compatible options can reduce redesign risk, shorten qualification cycles and give customers flexibility to move between devices as requirements, availability, cost or performance change.
Development Tools
Development support includes evaluation board EV12R33A, a Python Command Line Interface (CLI) with library, Linux driver and generic C library with multiple MCU code examples.
