Apple Inc.

Ludmil N Nikolov

Sanjay Pant

Enrico Zanetti

Shawn Searles

Hao Zhou

Vincenzo Bisogno

Nathan F Hanagami

Floyd L Dankert

Tiago Filipe Galhoz Patrao

Jay B Fletcher

Talbott Mead Houk

Siarhei Meliukh

Nikola Jovanovic

Di Zhao

Wenxun Huang

Alessandro Molari

Kiranjit Dhaliwal

Jianbao Wang

Hartmut Sturm

Ruopeng Wang

Tristan R Hudson

Seyedeh Maryam Mortazavi Zanjani

Nicola Florio

Chad L Olson

John J Sullivan

Maryam Mortazavi

Jonathan A Dutra

The present disclosure describes a system with a power management device, a wakeup circuit, a battery management device, and a connector. During a powered down mode of operation, the battery management device can provide, via the connector, a bias voltage to the wakeup circuit. In response to a wakeup switch being activated, the battery management device can provide a power supply (e.g., from a battery) to the power management device. Benefits of the wakeup circuit include (1) a reduction of battery consumption—and thus improving battery lifetime—when the electronic system is in a powered down mode of operation because the wakeup circuit has lower number of active components compared to other designs and (2) a non-complex wakeup circuit design because one or more existing connector interconnects between the power management device and the battery management device can be re-used during electronic system's powered down mode of operation.

Wakeup circuit

Systems and methods described herein correspond to supply harvesting operations. Power management circuitry may receive a supply voltage from other power management circuitry. This supply voltage may be a harvested supply from the other power management circuitry. Moreover, some of the power management circuitry may be operated as controller power management circuitry to supply the supply voltage via one or more rails and some of the power management circuitry may be operated as leaf power management circuitry to harvest the supply voltage from the one or more rails. Leaf power management circuitry may exclude a regulator, enabling that leaf power management circuitry to be entered into a lower power mode than previously enabled when the regulator was included.

General purpose input/output (GPIO) supply harvesting

A power delivery system included in a computer system uses multiple power converter circuits to generate respective voltage levels on multiple power supply nodes. An embodiment of the power delivery system includes an input power converter circuit that generates a voltage level for use by host and follower power converter circuits. The host power converter circuit generates an external demand current that is shared by multiple follower power converter circuits to regulate the voltage level on the multiple power supply nodes. The power delivery system can be scaled to different platforms of the computer system by adjusting the number of follower power converter circuits.

Scalable power delivery system

A power delivery system included in a computer system using multiple power converter circuits to generate respective voltage levels on multiple power supply nodes. The power delivery system includes a step-down power converter circuit that generates a voltage level for use by host and follower power converter circuits. The host power converter circuit generates an external demand current that is shared by multiple follower power converter circuits to regulate the voltage level on the multiple power supply nodes. The power delivery system can be scaled to different platforms of the computer system by adjusting the number of follower power converter circuits.

Growing community of inventors

Chippenham, United Kingdom

Ludmil N Nikolov