•  
• EDN Europe MAGAZINE
•  
• Free SUBSCRIPTION
• Subscription Renewal
• View Media Kit

• EDN
• EDN Australia
• EDN Asia
• EDN China
• EDN Japan

EDN Europe's Editor Graham Prophet posts a selection of comments and insights prompted by the many items of industry news and rumour that cross the editorial desk or are gathered on his frequent travels to interviews, press conferences and events around Europe - and further afield - and somehow never find their way to the magazine or the web site, recovering some of the information otherwise lost in the noise level...

Friday, August 21, 2009

Digital power inches forward

| Permalink | Email This | Comments (0) |

| Digg This | Slashdot This | add to Del.icio.us |

Industry research group Darnell reports that its latest estimates for the worldwide digital power IC market (including controller ICs, converter ICs and system management ICs) show expected growth from over 5 billion units in 2009 to 12.3 billion units in 2014, a compound annual growth rate of 19.8%. “This will be spread out over a diverse market of power supplies, including external ac-dc and embedded ac-dc power supplies, dc-dc modules, embedded dc-dc converters, telecom rectifiers and external dc-dc, lighting ballasts and inverters,” the analysts say; Darnell’s Senior Analyst Linnea Brush, comments ““Although digital solutions are still primarily being used in high-performance applications, the pervasive emphasis on energy efficiency is pushing digital from high-end-only into the mainstream. Digital control is now implemented in just about all application segments, from catalog power supplies to power supplies used in medical, solid-state lighting and consumer devices.”
Nevertheless, if you are using digital techniques in your power control loops, you won’t be in what the analysts term the “mainstream” until (depending on whose estimate you follow) 2015 to 2018 – so if you are not, then no need to panic just yet, perhaps. This also dodges the perennial question of what constitutes digital power control; it continues to be the case that products tagged as “digital power” might have anything from a bit of supervisory logic, to a current-and-voltage-control loop with a 32-bit DSP in it.
Hard times, (as Darnell’s report acknowledges) likely aren’t helping; when you have to get designs out with fewer engineers and tighter budgets, who has time to set aside to learn a whole new set of techniques?

Related entries in: Power Management |

Post a comment

* Display Name
* Comments
* Anti Spam security code	To pervent spamming, please enter the anti-spam code as shown above to proceed with the submission