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1124 results found, displaying items 281 - 300
PS Controllers Rev Up For Peak Loads
A new family of power-supply (PS) controller ICs supports supplies with peak-to-continuous power ratios of up to 3:1. This would make it possible to build supplies with less expensive components for applications such as printers, whose motors introduce steep, momentary power spikes when a job is initiated. For example, an inkjet printer that uses 30 W during printing might require a burst of up to 80 W when the paper-advance motor goes into action. Other potential...
Fast High-Voltage Pin Driver Doubles ATE Throughput
Along the lines of "Who watches the watchmen?" one of the toughest jobs for analog electronics has always been driving the pins on automatic test equipment (ATE). In this case, we're talking about speed coupled with high drive for test during burn-in (TDBI) applications. Intersil's ISL55100A quad pin electronics driver/window comparator drives up to 18 V and runs up to 65 MHz (see the figure). The IC has twice the drive...
Quater-Brick Power Density Hits 380 W
In telecom and data-center applications, dc-dc brick converters' power density keeps going up to match the number of point-of load (POL) converters on the board. The latest in the quarter-brick format (57.9 by 36.8 by 12.7 mm) is Ericsson Power Modules' PKM4000BPI series, which delivers up to 380 W from a 36- to 75-V input range (see the figure). These converters particularly target designs based on the Advanced Telecom ...
Breaking The Fossil-Fuel Addicton: GM Readies Fuel Cells For The Masses
President Bush has called us a nation "addicted to oil." I had a taste of freedom from our fossil-fuel fixation when I road-tested a car powered by hydrogen fuel cells at GM's Advanced Technology Center in Torrance, Calif., earlier this month. I've written about fuel cells before. But harvesting their power for a spin around the block has made me a true believer in the technology's viability to break our oil dependency and to do so soon, particularly if President Bush...
The Promise Of Harvested Energy
Nature possesses a boundless amount of harvestable energy that can be harnessed to power wireless sensor networks. Potentially, it can eliminate the need for batteries in tethered electronics and solve many power-supply and dissipation problems in one stroke. Vibration, strain and inertial forces, heat, wind, light, and magnetic fields can all be tapped for this purpose. Piezoelectric materials, for example, can convert mechanical motion into electric currents and...
Air Conditioner Chip Set Is Way Cool
If you think appliances built for the North American market lag in innovation, you're probably right. For decades, white goods built for Europe and Asia have been quieter and more efficient. But as the implications of rising energy costs sink in, this is changing. Some companies in the U.S. and Canada are updating their product emphasis to take advantage of overseas markets' latest goal—efficiency without a price premium. For instance, take International Rectifier's latest...
Bringing It Home: AC Efficiency
U.S. federal and state agencies are serious about appliance efficiency. California's latest Appliance Efficiency Regulations (CEC-400-2006-002) were released in January. The standards specify ?energy efficiency ratio? (EER) for room air conditioners and ?seasonal energy efficiency ratio? (SEER) for central-air-conditioning equipment. EER is ?the cooling capacity of an air conditioner in Btu per hour divided by the total electrical input in Watts.? Metric countries, of...
USB/AC-Adapter Battery-Charger IC Recharges Portables At Turbo Speed
The first product in a family of programmable lithium-batterycharger ICs for portable consumer applications is built around a 1-A current-mode step-down switching supply. Intended for USB or ac adapter power sources, Summit Microelectronics' SMB135 operates on input voltages from 4.35 to 6.0 V. (For applications where the ac adapter may be poorly regulated and/or an aftermarket product, the SMB135 can tolerate 10-V inputs without damage.) Charging the lithium-ion (Li-ion)...
Designers Have Some Breathing Room, But California Power Deadlines Loom
Those of you scrambling to meet the July deadline for the California Energy Commission's power-supply efficiency standards have gotten a bit of a reprieve—though you're not getting as much of an extension as the Consumer Electronics Association thinks you need. After intense negotiations between the CEC and CEA last month, California pushed the deadline for its mandatory power-supply standards from this July to January 2007. In addition to a no-load ceiling of 500 mW, the California...
Develop Affordable Mixed-Signal Battery-Charger Designs
The Solution To Portable Wireless Power Is...
New Power Technologies Will Reduce IT Operating Costs Significantly
Server power densities have increased dramatically over the last five years, from 800 W/ft2 to 1600 W/ft2. Also noteworthy is the fraction of data-center energy consumption by non-IT loads, which has grown to more than 50% of the center's energy budget. These significant increases in power density and energy use are pushing the energy component of cost-of-ownership to more than $5 million for a 500-kW data center over a 10-year life. This provides an opportunity to ...
Power-Management ICs Fuel Smarter Battery-Based Designs
Cell phones, MP3 players, digital cameras, handheld video games... the list goes on and on. Battery-powered systems are everywhere. One reason for such growth is the availability of batteries and power-management ICs that can support increasingly complex electronic systems. Figure 1 shows a typical power-management subsystem employed in a battery-based system. To be effective, these power-management subsystems must:...
Protocols, PoE, And The Less-Is-More Objective
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN Ericsson Power Modules has joined the Power Management Bus (PMBus) Implementers Forum. The company now can contribute to the development of a future, standardized digital power-management platform that it believes will benefit its customers in the short and long terms. The PMBus open-standard digital power-management protocol facilitates communication with a power converter or other device by defining the...
Power-Management ICs Meet Application Needs With Higher Levels Of Integration
Power-management ICs continue to evolve to meet specific application requirements. For example, some multifunction power-manager ICs focus on portable power systems. These ICs answer the portable system manufacturers' need to develop small-size, high-performance, feature-packed products that permit shorter system development cycles. Occupying anywhere from 50% to 70% less board space than discrete solutions, these ICs combine voltage regulation,...
System-On-A-Chip FPGAs Mix ASIC And Programmable Approaches
The LatticeSC family of system chips from Lattice Semiconductor melds some of the best features of ASIC technology and the flexibility of FPGA-based logic. This combination has yielded higher performance and more integration than previous FPGA solutions. These field-programmable system chips (FPSCs) include high-speed serializer-deserializer (SERDES) channels. In turn, these channels support data rates up to 3.4 Gbits/s. Also on the chips are high-speed parallel I/O...
Next-Generation Processor Delivers More On A Tight Power Budget
Users want more multimedia on their cell phones. That means more processing without increasing the power requirements. While that sounds like a tough task, Texas Instruments' next-generation OMAP3 processor fits the bill. This chip uses the ARM Cortex-A8 superscalar processor core along with an enhanced imaging video/audio accelerator (IVA 2+) subsystem. This subsystem handles streaming audio, video, video conferencing, and still-image capture and display. It...
True Digital
Power-One paved the way for digital control in the IBA marketplace in 2004 with its Zsystem. It comprised point-of-load (POL) converters, a digital power-management module (DPM), a single-wire bus to interconnect them, and friendly GUI-based software to make the system simple to use. Along with digital feedback-loop compensation, the Zsystem offered multi-POL control over output voltage, output tracking and sequencing, switching frequency, interleaving, and active...
Looks Like Analog, Designs Like Digital
In many cases, GUI-based design tools make closing the analog loop almost as easy as closing the loop in the digital domain. One recent example is National Semiconductor's 75-V, 2.5-A LM5005 buck regulator. In the figure, a screen capture from National's Webench tool shows recommended component values for a particular set of design parameters. A bill of materials and simulation results are a few mouse-clicks away. Texas Instruments' TPS65010 is another...
Digital Versus Analog Power Control—A Fight To The... Draw?
The gossip: Analog and digital will soon battle for control of power-supply regulation. The reality: When it comes to feedback-loop control, both approaches seem to happily coexist. (See "True Digital," p. 46, and "Looks Like Analog, Designs Like Digital," p. 48.) Indeed, many vendors offer a choice. Some of digital control's initial programmability advantages are now available even in controllers and regulators that use analog feedback. Still, digital...
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