Power Hotspot

Sponsored by Analog Devices Inc. What are the typical applications for a low-dropout (LDO) linear regulator? LDO linear regulators usually are employed in systems that require a low-noise power source instead of a switching regulator that might upset the system. LDOs also find use in applications where the regulator must maintain regulation with small differences between the input supply voltage and output load...

Wireless mesh networks such as ZigBee constitute a major enabler of small-scale energy harvesting. Last winter, I wrote about a European company in the utility submetering market called LEM (see “A Measure Of Opportunity Awaits In Electric Meters,”). Submetering products are purchased by companies looking for finer-grained information about their utility usage, which they get from their...

Large-scale energy harvesting isn't new. The Swiss have run their whole country on melted snow-water running downhill for more than a century. Nearly half a million Hollanders live in a province called Flevoland, which was completely under water until 1930. Much of that work was done by the wind. A few weeks ago, I visited a saltworks near my home on San Francisco Bay. For over 100 years, sun and wind enabled commercial salt harvesting in the region. For millennia before that, the...

While the scientific community has moved toward a consensus on global warming, some Electronic Design readers remain dubious. I know this because each time I've written something on the subject, I've gotten an e-mail earful from the skeptics. Perhaps this is because as engineers, 90% certainty isn't good enough. You want absolute proofs of cause and effect. Personally, I believe Al Gore. But talking about the former vice president to his detractors is like waving a...

This November, Mike Montemerlo's Volkswagen Passat wagon will drive a 60-mile trek through an urban landscape located somewhere in the western U.S. But Montemerlo won't be sitting behind the wheel, nor will anyone else. That's because Montemerlo's Passat happens to be a special robot model, custom-developed by the Stanford University Racing Team (...

Forget about those old gas guzzlers. Electric and hybrid vehicles are hitting the streets. A driving factor is consumer environmental concern, but improved technology has really made the difference—especially in motors, motor control, batteries, and power management. Now, the biggest challenge lies in matching consumer expectations and use to new products that don't operate like fossil-fuel-powered vehicles (...

Where would the electronics industry be today without consumer electronics (CE) and wireless technology? Shawn G. DuBravac, staff economist for the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA), has the answer. He says that the CE sector accounts for 40% of the electronics industry. "This includes components, including semiconductors, as well as finished products," he says. By some estimates, DuBravac says the CE sector accounts for more than half of all semiconductor sales...

I'm going to assume that any non-dystopian future will involve a great deal of large- and small-scale wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal power generation. But I'm not sure we're simply going to transition easily from smokestacks to sunshine. The nuclear option is going to play a part too. For example, pebble-bed reactors are set to power petroleum recovery from Canadian tar sands. Hard-Core Approach Many advocates of nuclear technology...

Performance consistency is a major challenge for LED lighting applications and market acceptance. An LED’s output tends to vary in color (i.e., the color temperature changes) over time. Units for the same processed batch can also experience these variations. Consequently, the LED industry has developed a “binning” methodology that makes it easier for users to select the LED source of choice. It should also be noted that LED light fixtures are integrated with...

Forgive the pun, but the future looks bright for solid-state lighting. Light-emitting diodes (LEDs) lead the way, while organic LEDs (OLEDs) promise even greater lighting efficiency and more energy savings in the years ahead. In fact, we'll soon see more LEDs in indoor and outdoor lighting applications than traditional light bulbs, incandescents, fluorescents, and halogen lamps. LEDs offer longer life and greater efficency than those other technologies, which is why they're...

Imagine implants that detect cancer and deliver the appropriate drugs. Or read the brain's electrical signals and control motor functions affected by diseases like epilepsy and multiple sclerosis. Or restore sight to the blind. Actually, you don't have to imagine. These devices, if they're not here yet, are in advanced stages of testing. And they're taking advantage of improvements in MEMS sensors and wireless communications. Hope For Heart...

Two new projects have been recently launched to further develop nuclear technology. One is a prototype modular plant, HTR-PM, intended to demonstrate the commercial potential of the HTR-10 pebble-bed technology. The other is a helium gas-turbine generator system coupled with the original HTR-10 pebble-bed reactor. Going forward, China is preparing to build a 190-MW demonstration reactor power plant at Rongcheng. If it’s successful, a total of 19 pebble-bed reactors generating...

I've been debating with a guy who argues that a transistor won't work as a transistor unless its VCE is bigger than its VBE (see figure) . He keeps reading this in books. Also, he points out that if the base and collector are nominally tied together to make a diode,...

Suppose someone were to design a way to power a heart pacemaker by scavenging some of the energy of the beating heart itself, doing away with batteries. Could your heart continue beating after your death in some sort of perpetual-motion scenario? Would you become a zombie? I had that conversation with Roy Freeland, CEO of a British company called, eerily enough, Perpetuum. Freeland had mentioned the possibility of harvesting the energy of the beating heart at the...

The 2008 National Electrical Code (NEC) will require arc-fault circuit interrupters (AFCIs) throughout new homes in the U.S. So, your new construction should now incorporate ground-fault circuit interrupters (GFCIs) that trip on an unbalance between line and neutral, basic circuit breakers that trip on gross faults, and AFCIs that trip on arcs. AFCIs are "don't burn the house down" protection, as opposed to the "don't electrocute yourself" protection provided by GFCIs. They...

Hello Bob: I'm designing wideband photodiode amplifiers and using Jerald Graeme's excellent book (Photodiode Amplifiers—Op Amp Solutions) as a reference. In the case of a composite transimpedance amplifier (TIA) discussed in Chapter 6, do you know whether the phase compensation requirement that dictates a value of CF for stability/gain peaking (i.e., the formula on page 58) changes? (Refer to my column "...

Former Vice President Al Gore calls it an inconvenient truth. But global warming represents an attractive opportunity for the power-management industry, which can employ its expertise in reducing energy usage to benefit consumers around the globe—as well as benefit the globe itself. The industry is now turning its attention to long-neglected white goods, which are the biggest users of electricity in homes. As developing regions of the world increase their demand for such...

More and more, designers are using the ZigBee short-range wireless technology to monitor remote sensors and transmit simple control messages in their industrial, building automation, and home applications. Freescale Semiconductor's MC1322x Platform in Package (PiP) not only makes it easier to implement ZigBee in these and other applications, it also offers ultra-low power consumption. ZigBee is an enhancement to the IEEE 802.15.4 personal-area networking (PAN) standard, which...

Analog Devices' Blackfin line has been extremely popular in portable and multimedia environments. Analog's move to 90 nm for its ADSP-BF52x line raises the performance bar to 600 MHz while cutting power requirements. Running at 250 MHz, the low-end core power requirements are 0.16 mW/MHz. The low end of the line gains USB support while the entire family supports Analog's Lockbox security, which includes a 64-kbit one-time-programming (OTP) area that can be used to store...

Keeping it cool is imperative in all kinds of applications. That's why designers are increasingly turning to the 64-bit Power architecture, which always sits at the top of the list in power/performance ratios. Following that trend, PA Semi uses the single- or dual-core PWRficient PA6T-1628M and takes the ratio more than a few steps further, consuming a mere 13 W on average for a 2-GHz processor (...