Power Hotspot

Electric cars aren't a joke anymore. Tesla Motors will make you forget all about their boxy styling, sluggish acceleration, and limited range with its sleek, environmentally friendly Roadster (Fig. 1). Founded by Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarppening in 2003, the company set out to build a green car that doesn't compromise on looks, performance, or efficiency. Previous electric cars only had a range of 60 to 80...

With the advent of cost-effective and powerful processors in the marketplace, digital solutions have entered a number of what were previously purely analog systems. For example, high-quality electric motors today are almost exclusively digitally controlled, using microcontrollers or DSPs. Motor speed and torque can be variably and precisely set due to the secondary control of current and voltage. This isn't yet the case in related applications, such as current or voltage supply in...

The 25-A ZL2005 digital-control point-of-load (POL) converter now has a baby brother. Zilker Laboratories' 3-A ZL2105 seamlessly interfaces with the ZL2005, but it also integrates its own power MOSFETs (RDS(ON) = 120 mΩ) and boost diode. It's designed to work alongside one or more ZL2005s (see the figure). Zilker's claim to fame isn't that it closesthe voltage-regulation loop in the digital domain, though the fact that the...

Summertime, and the livin' is... pricey. This issue's cover story on energy-efficiency standards seems well timed. I'm in a state of shock over the seasonal rates, pushing my monthly electric bill to more than $400. I'm thinking fondly of my years in Seattle, where the typical home doesn't even have an air conditioner. But the halcyon days of cheap power for Northwest consumers may be coming to an end. Since their construction 50 years ago, Eastern Washington's publicly owned...

What's a poor power-supply designer to do? The U.S. alone has four standards for energy efficiency: Energy Star, Executive Order 13221 (1-W Standby), 80 Plus, and the regulations of the California Energy Commission. Europe grapples with at least seven: the International Energy Star program, Blue Angel, the Group for Energy Efficient Appliances, the European Code of Conduct, EU Eco Label, Energy Plus, and Nordic Star. Then there's the Australia Greenhouse Office (Australia also...

EU ENERGY + AND THE EU ECO LABEL: Energy + is an initiative of the European Commission and national energy and environmental agencies to promote energy-efficient refrigerators and freezers. They're not involved in electronics, except as they affect white goods. Texas Instruments, International Rectifier, and other compaies discovered that motor control in white goods presents a real opportunity, so look for tighter linkages between standards for major appliances and digital...

The BoostCap energy-and power-type C-cell ultracapacitor cells and multicell packs provide "life-ofthesystem" alternatives to batteries for a host of industrial and transportation uses. Maxwell Technologies' 2.5-V cells are the same size as a C battery but weigh a third as much. Designed for easy mounting on pc boards, applications include industrial robotics, actuators, telecom power buffering and backup, aircraft door and airbag actuation, and distributed power nodes for automotive...

Hey Bob: This motorcycle road-racing engineer can tell you that the whole nitrogen-fill thing is usually a load of you know what (see "Bob's Mailbox," March 16, p. 20). The first thing they do when demounting/mounting your tire is to spray the entire bead area with copious amounts of soapy water. Repeatedly. So all the dry nitrogen in the world isn't going to amount to a hill of beans when the environment inside the tire is quite moist. To make it worth anything you'd need...

Consumers want fuel efficiency as well as utility in their cars. That's why the U.S. Department of Energy has teamed with General Motors to sponsor Challenge X: Crossover to Sustainable Mobility. This three-year contest asks university teams to enhance a 2005 Chevrolet Equinox's fuel efficiency by 50% while decreasing tailpipe emissions—and maintaining performance. Seventeen teams answered the call. During the first year of the contest, they focused on...

The most power-hungry component in the average laptop is the cold-cathode fluorescent (CCFL) backlight for the display. I had heard that CCFLs were on their way out, though, and that their exemption from the European Union's Restrictions on Hazardous Substances was subject to regular review. But I'd also heard that their demise was a few years away, since LED diffusers just weren't ready for prime time yet. Stopping by some of the smaller booths at the recent...

30-MIPS core processor with 16-bit arithmetic logic unit, 16-by-16 multiplier-accumulator, dual 40-bit accumulators Push-pull 16-bit pulse-width modulator with 1-ns duty cycle resolution and phase-shiftable outputs 20-ns analog comparators with programmable references Analog comparator can terminate the PWM pulse early, enabling cycle-by-cycle current limiting 10-bit ADC with 2-Msample/s rate Sample...

Hailed as the next generation of digitally controlled power-supply ICs, Microchip Technology's Digital Signal Controller (DSC) ICs give power supplies internal digital control. While they aren't the first ICs intended for this purpose, their price tag starts at $2.99 each in lots of 10,000, which is far below any of their predecessors. These devices are configured within the supply s feedback loop, so speed is critical. That's because the analog-to-digital...

Clock gating: Switching off the clock to flip-flops if the transition during clocking results in the same value. Dynamic Voltage Frequency Scaling (DVFS): Change both the voltage and frequency of a logical block during operation based on the task it performs to produce a cubic power reduction. Isolation cells: Prevent physical damage to sections of the IC that interface to power switch-off modules. ...

At a time when a single data center may consume more power than millions of homes1, it's easy to see that power consumption has become critically important for all designs—not just battery-powered products. Leakage power now dominates 90- and 65-nm devices, and high power consumption imposes ever more severe heat and performance penalties. Of course, the chip-or system-level power requirements are in addition to the perennial requirements of higher performance,...

The emergence of BACnet-compatible hardware/software interfaces is driving the convergence of discrete building automation systems, such as HVAC and lighting, into an integrated, facility-wide, energy-management structure that provides management and control of two-thirds of a building's total energy load. (The three-tier load comprises HVAC, lighting, and plug load.) Popular front-end software systems such as Tridium tie it all together through a single, user-friendly window to the...

If you wanted to buy an internal-combustion car today that delivers better than 40 mpg, you could do it--the VW Golf featuring the TDI turbo diesel. Actually, you couldn't buy it in New York, Massachusetts, or California, because it doesn't meet their smog standards on currently available U.S. diesel fuel. Using low-sulfur European diesel, it beats all U.S. smog standards. A diesel engine gets its best mileage on the open road. Yet hybrids shine in stop-and-go city driving. So,...

Alcohol is the best known--and most hyped--alternative fuels. In lower concentrations, it's an octane booster and a replacement for the methyl tertiary-butyl ether (MTBE) that replaced tetra-ethyl lead in earlier gasoline blends. It also makes it possible to run engines with high compression ratios without pre-ignition. In higher concentrations, it turns into a clean-burning fuel. Since alcohol has about 24% lower specific heat than gasoline (26.7 versus 34.9 kJ/kg), though, you need to...

Beyond mere self-interest, there are at least two reasons EEs might want to keep an eye on developments in alternative fuels for transportation. For power engineers, the odds are strong that most future vehicles will use electric motors, either exclusively or in some kind of hybrid arrangement. For the digiterati among us, there will be control and monitoring opportunities in the vehicle and up and down the distribution chain. That sounds suspiciously like jobs and opportunity. Welcome to...

Several factors influence the significant growth of electronics in the automotive arena, chief among them are technology, competition, performance, safety and regulations. As semiconductor technology advances, component costs are becoming lower and devices become more reliable than electromechanical solutions. Competition is driven by the fact that carmakers are using electronics-based features. Car makers are also in need of optimizing fuel consumption levels and engine performance, which...

What is a voltage reference IC? A voltage reference IC is an accurate, temperature-compensated voltage source that provides specific output voltage values, such as 1.225, 4.096, or 10.000 V. What are the two basic topologies for voltage reference ICs? Voltage reference ICs may be either shunt (twoterminal) or series (three-terminal) types. How is a shunt reference IC configured? The shunt reference IC employs an external series...