 Every single week we do the great search. Brought you by Digikey. Thank you Digikey for supporting our show. Yay, thank you. And, uh, Lady Aida, what are you looking for this week on the Great Search? Okay, so, um, back to my computer. We are looking to use this chip, the Coral Accelerator Module, and, uh, Machine Learning Accelerator Chip. I want to make a breakout for it and maybe start, maybe, you know, implementing stuff for Raspberry Pi on it. I think that would be cool. It, however, has really, um, let's see, I have to find the location where it is. It has pretty serious power supply requirements. Um, if you go down to our on-sequence power network, power delivery network design, it can, it normally drives, it normally draws about 500 milliamps, but it can spike up to three amps, uh, very quickly, which means, first of all, we're going to need big-ass capacitors. Okay, so let me, let me get the gigantic capacitors, um, next week on the Great Search. But for now, I want to get some sort of buck regulator because I want to power as well as USB. I want something that'll convert to about 4.5 to 5.5, down to 3.3 at, like, 3 plus amps, which is, like, not a small amount of current. I mean, maybe it's not a ton of current, believe me, I know people who are, like, they deal with hundreds of amps of current, but for, like, you know, small electronics, that's, that's quite a bit. So, um, this is kind of an interesting thing because the normal way you, I would search is, you know, you go to Digikey and you're like, well, I mean, maybe I'll search for 3.3, uh, buck converter, right? And you can do it this way. Um, you can go to, you know, DC-DC regulators, and you can search for them, but I'll say that there's actually almost, like, too many options. Like, power supplies are, if it's a linear regulator, it's pretty easy, but if it's a buck converter, um, the problem is there's, there's, like, there's chips that can do buck and boost, um, there's ones that have fixed or adjustable voltages, and it can get actually a little challenging because, also, you know, you want the current output, but sometimes it's, like, the switch current and, like, the frequency. I actually don't end up usually, for power regulators like this, this is one of the few things that actually don't go straight to Digikey, which is weird because you're like, why am I watching the great search if you're not actually going to search on Digikey? What happens is I search at, you know, I look to see what kind of company makes the parts I'm looking for, and then I look on their site because they're just going to be much better at, um, like, for example, you have to deal with, like, things like, you know, thermal management and efficiency, and you're going to be able to get much more specific searches on those sites for this specific type of problem. I'll say the same thing for microcontroller. Power supply managers and microcontrollers are the two things where I usually go to the manufacturer page, and then I bounce back to Digikey to find, like, what's in stock and what's available, and I kind of go between the two. So, um, I happen to, like, TI buck converters. I do make a ton of them. Another thing is I had to say, I'm very picky. I actually kind of like the latest converters. I know that there's, like, you know, the oldies and goodies, the LM, like, 76s or whatever, but I really like to have kind of the latest. So what I end up doing is I end up going to TI's website, and if you buy samples from TI, by the way, they ship to Digikey, and then here I go through to products and power management. And again, I don't do this for everything, but I do do this for some boost and buck converters, especially ones where I'm very specific about, I need, like, very high current or very specific voltage or very specific requirements, not just like, oh, generic, you know, I just need, like, 100 milliamps of 5 volts. You can get that anywhere. But 3 to 4 amps from 3 volts is actually tougher. So I'm going to look for buck regulators, and I don't want ones with the integrated inductor. I'm not super into those yet. They're cool, but I'm not quite ready. I don't know. Maybe next year I'll be ready for those. I like to have the separate inductor. So they have a couple different options. They have a controller. These are where you have external MOSFETs. This is great for extraordinarily high currents, extremely high voltages, like really, like, weird messed up situations that I don't usually deal with. For most things, I just want a converter. I want it to regulate it. It has a built-in MOSFETs. I just give it a capacitor inductor. I'm good to go. Most people make you happy. And this is what I really like. It's like, they have this very nice search system, like the Quick Search, where I just kind of give it approximately what I want, and it will give me options. And it will kind of winnow through all, like, you know, there's like 100 different buck converters. So for USB, you know, basically the voltage can be as little as 4 volts. I know 4.5 is the specification. But, you know, if I'm pulling a lot of current, I want it to be able to run down at 4 volts. The max is going to be 5.5. I want 3.3 volt output. And I want 3.5 amps. And you're like, wait a minute, you know, the data sheets hit 3 amps. I know, but I like to give it always like 10%, 15% extra. It seems like a wise idea. So, and I don't care about the quiescent, because this is in battery power. This thing is going to be plugged into the wall. So, who cares about the quiescent? No problem. And you can see that there's more. You know, you can do the little draggy drops and change this around if you want. I can adjust the current maximum and the duty cycle requirements. You know, I don't really care about the safety category. For the package groups, you know, I don't want BGAs, but I don't think I need to mess with this yet. For rating, I don't need automotive. Usually there's an automotive version and a catalog version. You know, I'll just cut it in half by only looking at those. And then, so, you know, now you only have a couple options. Which is really nice. I like that. There's not a lot of things I have to worry about. There's only a couple options. And you can look at the packages, you know, to see and get an idea of, like, some of these are kind of big, they're HTTops and I don't really want those. But, you know, the top one is kind of nifty. I mean, first off, it's inexpensive. It runs at a kind of a mind-boggling 2.4 megahertz, which is, you know, nothing for a Mac controller, but for a converter, it's quite high. And it's only six pins. And, you know, I'm really into small number pins. Smaller the better. But there's a couple other good options. There's the TPS62095. I've used the TPS62 series quite a bit. It's a lovely little series. So I can check out all these, but let's maybe start with this one. And then you can, you know, you can actually go into, like, these other, like, web bench designers. I actually haven't used this before. But you can, like, do simulations and stuff. You can check out the datasheet. Let me open up the datasheet. And, yeah, so it's a series that's available in different currents. So it's actually kind of nice. I like that. It's like you can, you can, you know, pick this up with the internal monsters have different current carrying capacity. You'll have to have more capacitance, of course, and a different size inductor. But for the most part, you can pick which one you like. And this seems nice and simple, right? You know, you just need an inductor, a couple capacitors. The thing is, you know, you're not going to get great efficiency at 4 amp current. But let's see, you know, VL 3.3 from VIN. Okay, like, you know, 90% just not bad. I think this is pretty good. So this might be a good option. And then what I do is once I find this, I take the beginning part of the part number because you can see it's a series. The X means it's like, you know, it's one, two, three, four for like one, two, three, four amps. I go here and then I just type it in. And I can see what the options are. So there's actually a couple of things. There's a new, there's some new dev boards. So they do have it a valve board. You know, I usually don't get a valve boards, but for power supplies, I sometimes do because power supply layout, you really, you know, you can look at the Gerbers, but sometimes having it is very handy. You can really see if you're able. I've designed power supplies and, you know, not had like two ounce copper, not had four layer PCBs. And I haven't quite gotten the current output that I was expecting. And sometimes getting the valve board helps me determine is it the chip or is it my layout? Is it like my capacitor inductor or is it, you know, what is it that is keeping me from getting what I think I should be getting out of the power supply? So I'll probably pick up one of these valve boards, 60 bucks, you know, it's not bad. And then over here, I've got the regulators and it looks like there's a couple options fixed and then this is the full series. So this is the one that I want. I think this one is the four amp version. So they have a couple in stock. And yeah, you know, when you get to a taping wheel, they're 88 cents, which is a good deal, you know, with the inductors, you know, the inductors, like maybe, you know, a dollar capacitor for, sorry, a dollar for the capacitor inductors. The whole power supply is maybe two bucks. It's active. You know, you can download, it looks like they have a CAD model even so I can get started instantly. And I like that it's just small, you know, like it's small. I don't need a special heat sinking. I'll just check the datasheet to make sure that I can, I can use this on a two layer board and I'll plug this next to the core module and I'll try it out. I'll just try, you know, decoding a couple models, like, you know, vision models. And first off, see if I can get into performance and then use my oscilloscope to make sure that my 3.3 volt line is nice and steady. So that's the next step for this design. So I'm very excited. The TPS62-827. Okay, and that's this week's... The buck converter of the week. Great search for Digikey.