Today’s designers of networking equipment and high availability systems are being pushed to increase the data throughput and performance of their systems as well as add functionality and features, while keeping overall power consumption to a minimum. These complex systems require many FPGAs, ASICs, DSPs and processors with multiple voltage rails. Line cards with 30 to 40 rail voltages are not uncommon. Managing this number of rails can be a real challenge. During development, the board designer must find a way to power up the system, sequence the supplies in the correct order and have the ability to adjust voltage rails on-the-fly. Digital power management ICs provide this flexibility and, ultimately, ensure a faster time to market. The user can easily adjust supply voltages, while reading parameters like voltage, current or temperature via an I²C compatible interface. The order supplies that are sequenced up and down can be reconfigured, supply voltage can be trimmed to optimize system performance while receiving real-time feedback, and supply margining can be performed in manufacturing. Accuracy of the digital power IC for voltage rail measurement and adjustment is important to provide tight control over the supplies and improve overall efficiency. In addition, a properly designed digital power management system can provide the user with power consumption data, thereby enabling smart energy management decisions. Digital communication enables field updates of new configuration files for adjusting system performance, while fault logging allows the system to be polled and diagnosed for failures. Digital power management ICs give the engineer complete access and control of the power supply. As a result, integrated power management solutions are sought in an effort to reduce system component count and complexity, which ultimately leads to lower cost, higher reliability and increased flexibility.