WWhen designers create new devices, they need info about the
latest electronic components to hit the market. One of the ways
to gather this information is via Products of the Week.
This e-newsletter is sent to more than 60,000 subscribers
each Monday and covers innovative new products and technologies
in the semiconductor, components and assemblies,
boards and modules, and design, assembly, and test sectors,
with direct links to the manufacturers’ datasheets or product
information. All of the products that appear in it are carefully
selected by the Electronic Design editorial staff.
The products in the Components & Assemblies section of
the newsletter comprise the workhorse devices of electronic
designs, such as LEDs, pushbutton switches, connectors, resistors,
motors, and pressure sensors. These releases are by far the
most diverse in the industry and are indispensible to designers.
We compiled a list of the components in our newsletters
that generated the most interest, via clicks on their links, for
approximately the past 12 months). You can find the complete list of 101 products here. Also, check out the top 10 Interconnects (Table 1), Power Sources (Table 2), Displays & Indicators (Table 3), Passive Components (Table 4), and Sensors & Transducers (Table 5).
For
now, we’ll turn the spotlight on the top 10 overall.
POWER TO THE (DESIGNER) PEOPLE
The top two spots on the list are products that fit into a category
we call Power Sources. Although both products fit the
bill, they couldn’t be more different.
The number one product on the list is a 30-kW ac-dc power
supply from Pioneer Magnetics. The PM37223-10P PFC is
a liquid-cooled rack-mount supply that supplies 360 V at 30
kW (Fig. 1). It fits within a 2U 19-in. rack configuration and is
available in air-cooled versions and with a wide range of output
voltages. The efficiency of the supply is greater than 92% at
80% of load. Input voltage ranges from 408 to 528 V ac with a
power factor correction (PFC) of greater than 0.95 at full load.
Contrast this supply with the power source that took second
honors, the 600-mA EP5368QI from Enpiron. This synchronous
buck dc-dc converter targets low-power mobile designs
(Fig. 2). It relies on a high level of integration that localizes high-frequency noise associated with switch-mode converters.
The device also employs voltage-mode control to achieve high
noise immunity and reliable load matching to current sub-90-nm
semiconductor process technologies.
Measuring 3 by 3 by 1.1 mm in a quad flat no-lead (QFN)
package with an integrated inductor, a complete design requires
just two tiny multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs). The converter
employs a 4-MHz switching frequency and achieves up to
94% efficiency. It delivers 600 mA of continuous output current
over an industrial temperature range and 700 mA over the commercial
temperature range. Pricing is $0.98 each/10,000.
IT’S COOL TO BE COOL
One of the items on the top 10 list is somewhat of a surprise,
since it comes from the Cooling Products category, which usually
doesn’t garner many clicks. But the latest range of flat
heat pipes from Gelmec UK seems to have struck a chord with
designers. The new device promises fast removal of heat up to
310 W directly from the source and transfer to the chassis or an
external heatsink (Fig. 3).
Housed in an aluminum package measuring 1.2 to 2.5 mm
thick, the component can eliminate the fan, heatsink, and thermal
pad in many applications. As you might guess, this translates into
reductions in power consumption, noise output, product thickness,
and cost. Typical applications include cooling LCD and
plasma displays, LED lighting, CPUs, memory components, and
hard-disk drives.
DISPLAYS & INDICATORS GET THE PICTURE
The Displays and Indicators category took four of the top 10
spots, with two displays and two indicators, better known as
LEDs. This isn’t surprising. On the one hand, electronic displays
appear almost everywhere, and the technologies behind them are
constantly evolving. On the other hand, LEDs are probably the
hottest devices in the components area and today go well beyond
their mundane “indicator” jobs into full-scale lighting applications
that are part of the greening of America.
Engineers have a high interest in LEDs simply because there
are so many innovative ways to use them. Take our fourth place
finisher, the Ostar headlamp LED from Osram Opto Semiconductors.
Employing an integral shutter, this LED unit promises
to simplify automotive headlamp optical systems by emitting a
highly efficient and clearly defined light beam without the need
for external shutters (Fig. 4).
The LED is available in one-, two-, three-, four-, or five-chip
arrays, allowing designers to create different illumination patterns
for virtually any headlamp design. A glass cover bonded
to the frame protects the chips and helps prevent scatter losses.
With a 12-W rating, the headlamp produces between 125 lumens
at 700 mA (one chip) and 1000 lumens at 1 A (five chips). Additionally,
with a street-legal color temperature of 6000 Kelvin,
the LEDs emit light nearly identical to natural daylight. As an
additional bonus, the headlamp specifies a lifespan of 10,000 to
20,000 hours.
In fifth is an RGB LED, the ASMT-MT00 (Fig. 5). It is
Avago Technologies’ first 3-W Moonstone red, green, and
blue LED for solid-state architectural and commercial lighting
applications. The component delivers 108 lumens and
is independently controllable to enable color-changing and
mixing capabilities. It employs three separate power LED
chips and features a 120° viewing angle. Each chip accommodates
a drive current of 350 mA, and the entire package
can pre-mix red, green, and blue in the reflector cavity to
produce a uniform white output. Price is $7.90 each/1000.
The OSD35GN827, an LCD from OSD Displays, took
ninth place and piqued the interest of our readers, no doubt,
because of its integrated touchscreen (Fig. 6). The display
itself is a 3.5-in. diagonal transmissive QVGA TFT-LCD
targeting low-cost consumer and industrial applications. A
high-performance long-life white LED backlight gives the
display an initial typical brightness of 240 cd/m2.
With the backlight on, the contrast ratio is 350:1. The
module integrates LCD control functions using chip-onglass
(COG) technology. The COG controller supports a
24-bit SYNC mode TTL interface that delivers up to 16.7
million colors. Pricing is $15 each/10,000.
Tenth on the list is an example one of the newer technologies
in the display industry, the OLED. The AZOLED034A
3.4-in. and AZOLED043A 4.3-in. widescreen-format OLED
displays from AZ Displays combine a bare OLED panel and
an integrated video decoder board (Fig. 7). The decoder
board lets users display content with plug-and-play ease via
a composite video input, computer VGA input, or both. Both
displays can display high-quality color graphics and fullmotion
video without a backlight.
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