Would there be any benefit other than cost to analog power control chips like this rather than DSP controlled power supplies like we typically see today?
I'd imagine that their better response latency is eaten up by downstream capacitors anyway. Maybe they'd have better dynamic range to allow them to converge on a clean signal better than a stream of digitized samples that are always probably little off converged one way or the other by some quantum?
I'll be the first to admin that power control isn't my forte though, and most arguments I can come up absolutely sound like the specious stuff you hear out of 'audiophiles'.
Even MCU controlled SPS often times have pure analog control loop, where A/D and MCU is there mostly there for monitoring and perhaps digital control of some loop parameters, but the software is not an integral part of the loop itself...
Which is perhaps for the good, if you look for example on the boost topology, where saturation of the inductor leads to the shorting of the input through a switching transistor to the ground... :)
Here's an interesting video series describing such a software-configured, hardware-controlled switching controller.
Here, Microchip markets this particular line of PIC MCUs as a "field-programmable switch-mode power controller". But weirdly I haven't seen that language on their main site.
DSPs are more expensive to engineer than these tried and tested chips. If you need the functionality of a DSP then you use one but the core performance of a power supply is relatively unaffected.
I'd imagine that their better response latency is eaten up by downstream capacitors anyway. Maybe they'd have better dynamic range to allow them to converge on a clean signal better than a stream of digitized samples that are always probably little off converged one way or the other by some quantum?
I'll be the first to admin that power control isn't my forte though, and most arguments I can come up absolutely sound like the specious stuff you hear out of 'audiophiles'.