PMBus® Tools
Third-party hardware & software
Tools potentially useful for working with PMBus, but not endorsed by the PMBus group.
Tool providers
- SMIF tools members
- Other providers
Micro Computer Control Corporation (MCC)
Micro Computer Control Corporation (MCC) is a SMIF tools member, entitled to use SMIF and PMBus trademarks.
MCC specializes in signal analyzers and interface solutions for small area networks. These networks (electronic signal pathways) provide chip-to-chip communication links in a wide variety of consumer, computer, network, fiberoptic, aerospace, military, and medical electronic circuits. We provide solutions for engineers working with established and emerging integrated circuit communication standards, including I²C Bus (Inter-Integrated Circuit Bus), SMBus (System Management Bus), PMBus (Power Management Bus), IPMI (Intelligent Platform Management Interface), SBS (Smart Battery System), and more.
MIIC-101 Bus Monitor
The MIIC-101 Bus Monitor is a Stand-Alone or Remote Troubleshooting Tool for the I²C Bus (Inter Integrated Circuit Bus), SMBus (System Management Bus) and other standard or customer derived protocols. When connected to an active bus, the MIIC-101 Bus Monitor can collect, display or upload information on all bus activity.
ProGrAnalog
ProGrAnalog is a SMIF tools member, entitled to use SMIF and PMBus trademarks.
Leverage our Economies of Scale and Automated Design Flow for Power Management
Faster Time To Market at a Lower Cost
Teledyne LeCroy
Teledyne LeCroy is a SMIF tools member, entitled to use SMIF and PMBus trademarks.
Teledyne LeCroy, the Instrumentation segment of Teledyne Technologies Incorporated, provides monitoring and control instruments for marine, environmental, industrial and other applications, as well as electronic test and measurement equipment. We also provide power and communications connectivity devices for distributed instrumentation systems and sensor networks deployed in mission critical, harsh environments.
PMBus Trigger Decode (TD)
The PMBus Trigger Decode (TD) solution provides high performance triggers and transparent color-coded decode overlays, protocol tables, and search capabilities.
Embedded Linux
MinnowBoard Linux platform
The MinnowBoard project is an open hardware platform that uses Intel Architecture. While the project, overall, is focused on hardware there are a lot of things surrounding this effort that can, and are, useful both to the project and to the greater open source community. As such the MinnowBoard project (from a GSoC perspective) is more of an umbrella giving a home to a number of other projects to collectively work on and around the enablement of the MinnowBoard. The SMBus 3.0 specification was recently released, and Linux does not fully support the changes to the specification, and the MinnowBoardMax drivers do not fully support the specification. The SMBus driver architecture and API need to be updated as well as adding full support for MinnowBoardMax. There are Haskell modules available for USB and UART, but not for I²C/SMBus/PMBus. Tool builders and robotics enthusiasts in the functional programming community could use supporting modules.
mjm wired (Mauriat Miranda)
Linux PMBus core driver and internal API
While PMBus commands are standardized, there are no mandatory commands, and manufacturers can add as many non-standard commands as they like. Also, different PMBus devices act differently if non-supported commands are executed. Some devices return an error, some devices return 0xff or 0xffff and set a status error flag, and some devices may simply hang up. Despite all those difficulties, a generic PMBus device driver is still useful and supported since Linux kernel version 2.6.39. However, it was necessary to support device-specific extensions in addition to the core PMBus driver, since it is simply unknown what new device-specific functionality PMBus device developers come up with next.
This driver supports hardware monitoring for various PMBus compliant devices. It supports voltage, current, power, and temperature sensors as supported by the device. Each monitored channel has its own high and low limits, plus a critical limit. Fan support will be added in a later version of this driver.
Saleae
TI Community
DM8168 AVS PMBus Driver (.pdf, 11 pages, 185 KB)
SmartReflex-AVS is a technology that uses an adaptive power supply to achieve the goal of reducing active power consumption. DM816x devices have Class 2B implementation of smart reflex and this allows dynamic AVS using the software. PMBus specific driver support is required for PMICs such as TP40400 present in DM816x-based devices. PMBus is an open standard protocol that defines a means of communicating with power conversion and other devices. It is a communications protocol based on I²C. Hence, it is just a specification or a wrapper over I²C.