The new devices represent a compact solution for current requirements over 130 amperes. Building on ST’s experience and success in the motherboard VR market, the voltage regulators offer two distinctive factors: the L6714 is the industry’s first 4-phase motherboard PWM (pulse-width modulator) controller to incorporate embedded high-current MOSFET drivers, thereby reducing valuable board area and increasing system reliability compared to alternative approaches that require external MOSFET drivers, while the L6713 allows simple migration between 4-phase and 3-phase topologies (e.g. to produce lower cost product variations) without the need to change the pc-board layout when a 4-phase application is migrated to three phases. Migration is achieved simply by depopulating the board of the external components related to the 4th phase and replacing the L6714 with the pin-compatible L6713. This eliminates the cost and time delay involved in redesigning and re-qualifying the highly complex motherboard.

ST’s long experience in integrating power analog, small signal analog, and digital circuitry has enabled the Company to incorporate the PWM controller, MOSFET drivers, and protection mechanisms in a single chip that provides the industry’s best system-partitioning solution in terms of cost, printed-circuit board space, system reliability, and product evolution options. Key technical features of the L6713 and L6714 include output accuracy of ±0.5% over temperature and input voltage variations; flexible and accurate control via fully differential current sensing across either the external inductors or LS (low side) MOSFETs per phase, causing the device to enter Constant Current mode in the event of overcurrent detection; preliminary overvoltage protection that safeguards the CPU in the event of HS (high side) MOSFET failure during start-up; excellent thermal performance, thanks to the HTQFP64 package with exposed thermal pad; active current sharing with an accuracy of ±3% between phases; fast dynamic response; differential voltage sensing; programmable offset; programmable overvoltage threshold; programmable oscillator frequency; programmable digital soft-start; SS_END/PGOOD signal and system thermal monitoring.