As automotive, AI/data center, networking, and industrial systems move toward 48V power architectures for greater efficiency and higher power demands, designers need more than a snapshot of voltage and current. They need systems that understand energy use over time and respond intelligently to changing power conditions. Microchip Technology today announced the PAC1761 and PAC1861 families of 65V energy-aware digital power monitors, which combine accumulated power-measurement insights with high-voltage measurement headroom and transient spike protection to make 48V architectures more efficient and resilient.
The move to 48V demands added operating margin, and the new devices offer up to 65V measurement and 75V spike protection to ensure transient survivability. On top of this, they can understand and react in real time to energy usage dynamics based on accumulated power measurement data.
Mr. Keith Pazul, Vice President of Microchip’s mixed-signal linear business unit, said the industry conversation is shifting from measuring power at a single point in time to understanding and responding to energy behaviour across an entire system and its lifecycle. He said the PAC1761 and PAC1861 families are designed to help customers build better-performing, more reliable 48V systems that can measure instantaneous conditions and understand energy consumption and availability over time. The scalable, low-power solutions reduce monitoring overhead, he added, and pin-compatible package options improve source flexibility while reducing design risk.
The devices feature programmable alerts for voltage, current, and power excursions, step-limit detection to identify sudden load changes, and configurable accumulated-energy thresholds that enable proactive system management based on both instantaneous and long-term power behaviour.
Target applications include automotive, AI/data center, networking, industrial, server, telecom/Power over Ethernet (PoE), and 48V power distribution systems. The 12-bit PAC1761 and 16-bit PAC1861 are available in VDFN-8 (similar to SOT23-8), VDFN-10, and MSOP-10 packages, including automotive-orderable variants. Pin-compatible options can reduce redesign risk, shorten qualification cycles, and give customers flexibility to switch between devices as requirements, availability, cost, or performance change.
Development support includes the EV12R33A evaluation board, a Python Command Line Interface (CLI) with library, a Linux driver, and a generic C library with multiple MCU code examples.
