 Next up, DigiKey and Adafruit present. Hi, I'm M-P-I. Alright, this week's Ion M-P-I is from Diodes. I know. Well, you know, first up, I want to say, they do make Diodes and they make great Diodes, but they also make things that are not Diodes. And I feel like Diodes Incorporated, they don't get enough love. I mean, they're not one of like the big five semiconductor companies, but they do make really good stuff. In fact, our favorite regulators, our power converters and regulators, are from Diodes Incorporated. So I do want to give them a shout out. And so when I saw this product show up at digikey.com slash new, I was actually, and some people are like, oh, like, do people like, you know, are you told what to put on Ion P-I? No, believe me, the things they pick, these are things I'm actually personally interested in. And you're going to see this chip appearing a lot more of my designs because this chip is awesome. This is how we decide on what things we're going to put in our products. So the AP63300 and 001, which looks like this, very exciting. It's a T-SOT6. What is it? I'm glad you asked. Here is a leaflet from Diodes Incorporated, which kind of covers everything. New product announcement. This is a three amp, low quiescent current, synchronous buck converter with great EMI performance. But let me tell you what's awesome about this buck converter because, you know, I use low dropout regulators all the time. And even somebody asked me, you know, I think on the last Descalade 8, they're like, why don't you use buck converters or buck boost converters instead of a low dropout? And I'm like, well, usually there's a big price difference or a cost difference. So here's what's really cool about this series. So this is a table with a couple of different chips on it. I'm talking about the two ones at the top, the 6300 and the 63301. Okay, so the first thing that's awesome about these is the input range. It's 3.8 volts to 32 volts. So, like, you can put almost any voltage in here. Like, this is great. You can run off lead acid batteries. You can have it work in a vehicle. You can have it run off of like solar panels. You can run it off like anything, right? Alkalines and up. The output voltage is also a very wide range. It can go from 0.8 volts, that's the lowest, up to V in. And when it gets very close to V in, it actually kind of makes the chip turn into a low dropout regulator. You can read about that in the datasheet. Basically, just 30 volts up to 30 volts input up to 30 volts output. So this is great because a lot of the buck converters that we've seen are like, oh, max is at 12 volts or max is at 6 volts. This one, it's like pure range, right? I've never even used more than 24 volts in any of my designs. So this is great. I know there's people who are like, I have robotics projects. I want to have a buck converter for my robotics project, but I have 14 volts in or something. Not a problem. I have 28 volts in. Number three, the A out. Three amps continuous. Love it. And you don't need any external MOSFETs or diodes. It's synchronous. So all you need is a couple passive components. And we'll show that next. There's two versions. And I'm going to chat about the two next versions. Why there's an 01 and an OO. There's slightly different operation modes and quiescent currents, and I'll explain that shortly. But let's show off the template application circuit. Again, I love it. You don't need any external components. There's even a little boost converter thingy inside, booster for the high side FET. So that's the C3 capacitor. Input bulk cap, output bulk cap, voltage divider feedback loop with a little feedback cap, a little mini cap there just to stabilize it. And your big inductor. And you're done. That's it. There's an even enable pin. Love it. Like I said, it goes up to three amps. There's going to be differences in the efficiencies when you're talking about lower current. Lower current, less than 100 or 50 milliamps. So this is the, if you look at the bottom, it says the AP63300, which I'll just call the 300. So the 300 has good efficiency pretty much across the board. You can see here like various V-ins and V-outs. You're always going to be basically looking at, you know, 70 to 90% efficiency from a couple of milliamps all the way up to three amps. This is a log scale, of course. The 301, you'll notice, has a totally different efficiency scale. Once you get below, you know, about 100 milliamps, the efficiency plummets. So if you need high efficiency, whether it's at low or high current draw, you'll want the 300. There are some situations where you'll want the 301. Oh, the quiescent also matters. The quiescent current for the 300, the one that has high efficiency across like all the current, is going to be only 22 microamps. The 301 is, I think it says 280 microamps, 200-ish microamps, so a lot worse quiescent. You know, pretty high quiescent current for the 301. So you're probably like, well, wait a minute. So the 301 has much higher quiescent and is much less efficient at low current. Why on earth would I want that? The reason you would want that is, this is the 300, right? So the one that's high efficiency, low quiescent. And what I want you to look at in specific is in the top right, you've got that V-out ripple. So this is the ripple at low current, right? That says, I think, 50 milliamps. So you'll see that this version of the buck converter changes the way it does the PWM output, the frequency plummets to get better efficiency at low current. But it's a lot noisier. You see that range there is, it says 100 millivolts per division. Whereas the one that is fixed, more fixed frequency, and you can see the top right, the graphs are not in the same location. So just be aware that frequency is in the top right, you see the frequency stays stable. And because of that, the output voltage ripple is much, much lower. So basically, use the 300, you're going to get better efficiency at low current and you're going to have a lower quiescent current across the board. But if you're doing a lot of low current stuff under 100 milliamps and you need low noise, this might not be good for you. They're pin-compatible so you can switch and swap. Start with one, try the other. There's an eval board, I even picked up an eval board and just love the simplicity of it. It is a T-sot chip, which is kind of weird, you might be wondering, well, how it's doing three amps with internal MOSFETs, how is it dissipating all that current, that heat from that current draw? Well, first off, the internal MOSFETs are pretty low. I think they're like 75 milliamps. But also this PCB has a 2-ounce copper and you can kind of see that, I'll show on the overhead too, the pads are really big for the T-sot. Maybe, yeah, you want to zoom in. Of course, zoom in. You're near. You always talk about near and far. So that's the T-sot there and you see this has, it's much wider than you would expect a T-sot to be. So it uses this for current carrying and also for heat dissipation. You see the big chunk inductor, the bulk capacitance, and then of course here is the resistor divider and then on the bottom they have a little bit of a copper ground plane as the heat sink because this doesn't have a central heat sink pad, and they use a bunch of vias to help. There's a big ground plane stitch here. Oh, sorry, actually it's not the heat sink. I apologize. So that's the A that is just like a heat sink, sorry, a large ground plane with a larger ground plane on the bottom. But the heat dissipation, I think they do talk about, they just say use 2-ounce copper and just use these big pads. So that's the only thing. But otherwise, comparatively it's a very easy package to solder. You're not going to have any rework issues with this. You can even hand solder it if you want. So I think this is a great comparison and then of course the best thing about this chip is the price. It's like 40 cents on a real. Which means it's basically the same price as an LDO. So if you're using a 780X or if you're using a 1117 or any of those popular LDOs you can like toss it out and use this, you know, 10-20 cent inductor. You're going to have wide input, wide output, extremely high current, no heat sink required and for the same price. So you get like better performance. You do have a little bit more noise because it's a buck converter. But overall, like, I looked and in this class for this range of inputs and outputs and current this is definitely the cheapest one. And I've always had a great experience with diode's ink converters. They're rock solid, even though they're like often the least expensive available. I've never had an AP2112 break on me. They've just been so solid. So I really like this buck converter. I think, you know, don't be scared off by the fact that it has this wide input, wide output and high current. It just means you can use it for anything. Like I'm going to use it for stuff that is, you know, 5 volt to 3 volt conversion. You know, with only like maybe a half an amp of current draw. Why? It's 40 cents. Put it on everything. Put it on your cheesecake. Give it to your kids for Christmas. Whatever. It's 40 cents. How can you go wrong? It's the AP63300. Alright, that was this week's... I have a very cool, unique product. Good find.