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POWER MONITOR: Conference covers digital power’s progress

The acceleration in digital-product introductions is continuing for both ICs and power converters. Over the last 12 months, only October surpassed June 2007 in terms of power- IC introductions (13 in October 2006, compared with 12 in June 2007). In the case of digital power converters, suppliers introduced more new products in June than in anyof the preceding 12 months. Digital solutions have started to reach price parity with analogue solutions, and apricing “crossover” has begun. Thiswill lead to increased adoption of digitalcontrol solutions in 2008, withdigital becoming the “primary growthengine for the power supply industry.”

The use of digital power conversion is already resulting in more efficient, “greener”, and lower cost power supplies. Digital power management in electronic systems is increasing system availability, improving thermal management, and lowering electricity consumption. Digital power, in short, is going “mainstream”. EDN Europe is sponsoring a conference on the subject in Munich, from November 13 to 15, 2007, which power-sector analyst Darnell Group organises. The inaugural Digital Power Europe event will reflect the expanded interest in, and the use of, digital power conversion and digital power management across a growingrange of electronic equipment.

Papers at Digital Power Europe will cover the entire spectrum of digital power technologies. Power-conversion topics will include controllers and control loops, communications, fault tolerance, stability analysis, converter efficiency, design tools, topologies, system partitioning between analogue and digital, power quality and EMC, and GUI developments. Digital-power-management papers will include improved system availability, voltage sequencing, hot-plugging, fault monitoring, power management, distributed power architectures, system configuration, and communications. Conference proceedingswill be in English.

As with most other engineering tradeoffs, in the power space digital versus analogue design choices ultimately come down to function and cost. And the real issue is cost, since customers will usually go with the cheapest solution that provides the minimum of what they need. That could be analogue, digital or hybrid. In some respects, the costs won’t be known until design teams fully develop the new architectures. These could use conventional packaging, or they could be a new and unconventional, “unbundled” approach that gives the OEM a higher degree of flexibility and reduces system costs. Digital Power Europe will give you a unique insight into the emergence and development of the next generation of power-conversiontechnologies.

Jeff Shepard is president of Darnell Group.
You can contact him at jshepard@darnell.com.

 

Powerstax retracts Reflecting the growing use of digital power techniques in Europe, Powerstax, the Farnborough (UK)-based power-solutions provider, recently added a new family of high-density 275W “digital” power supplies. The new N-0275 units feature digital powermanagement capabilities including optional I2C-capability. The onboard microcontroller monitors a number of the power supply’s parameters: dc voltage on the bulk capacitor (supplied by the ac mains), output voltage, output current, auxiliary 12V output voltage, transformer temperature, ambient temperature, and fan tachometer. Unlike conventional analogue control circuitry, which can achieve timing accuracies in the range of 10% to 20%, the microcontroller can provide timing accuracies in the 1% range and does not suffer from stored charge memory. Primarion expands Also indicative of the growing number of choices in digital-power solutions is Primarion’s recent addition of the dual-output, four-phase PX7542—with a 100-psec PWM (pulse-width-modulation) resolution—to its Di-POL product family of fully programmable digital-power-conversion and power-management ICs. The PX7542 is a powerconversion and power-management IC for synchronous dc/dc converters in the telecom, datacom, computing and storage markets, compliant with PMBus 1.1 specifications (Primarion is a member of the PMBus organisation). The solution simplifies design and increases the density of system-level power-management architectures with its minimum footprint, by controlling two independent outputs with two phases per output, or one to four phases in a single-output mode. You load, edit and save configurations for the device to non-volatile memory over the device’s I2C serial interface using Primarion’s graphical user interface. With configurations stored on the IC, the controller can perform real-time adjustments to the designer’s previously configured settings and thereby optimise performance accuracy, without the delay of accessing outside memory storage.