Understanding system telemetry

There has been a recent increase in demand for telemetry in many end-equipment applications using FPGAs or ASICs. The primary market segments with the largest increase in this demand have been in the computing, communications, defence, avionics and industrial markets. This article describes what telemetry is and examines several options for implementation.

First off, what is telemetry? As referred to in this article, telemetry is the measurement, control and automatic transmission of data through a digital interface such as PMBus, I2C or SPI. Why is telemetry needed in a power supply? Many end applications require voltage, current, temperature, power and several other device parameters to be monitored, and even controlled dynamically. For example, in a FPGA application with a multi-phase supply, telemetry could be used to add or shed one phase to adjust the solution for optimal performance. Other typical applications include servers, base stations, routers, defence applications, and test and measurement equipment.

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Originally published by Texas Instruments Inc. at www.ti.com as "System telemetry: What, why and how?".