I'll be travelling to Dallas, Texas, to cover the Power Electronics Technology Exhibition
and Conference, formerly known as PowerSystems World. If you ever attended that
event, you know that it attracted a mixed bag of power companies. In one aisle, you
might have seen a company hawking its latest flywheel technology, while an aisle later you may have found a manufacturer of dcdc
converter chips. That all has changed, and for
good reason.
David Morrison, editor of Power Electronics
Technology, decided that the show needed to
sharpen its focus and provide more information for
design engineers looking for power technologies
and components to integrate into consumer, telecom,
medical, and other applications.
I'm looking forward to it because David has put
together a compelling set of keynotes, seminars,
and technical sessions. And there will be a host
of companies exhibiting as well.
Sharpen your pencils
Professional advancement
courses will be held on the Sunday and Monday prior to
the opening of the conference. For example, "Universal Methods
of Analyzing and Designing Feedback Regulated DC-DC Switching
Power Converters" will be a half-day course led by Haachitaba
Mweene, a member of the technical staff at National Semiconductor.
Mweene will review Black's Feedback Formula and
Cramer's Rule for solving systems of equations. He also will
present some basic switching dc-dc converters (buck, boost,
buck-boost) and highlight their common features.
Also, check out "Energy Harvesting Technologies and Applications
for Vibration Energy Harvesters," led by Robert O'Handley,
Chief Scientist at Ferro Solutions. This seminar will include
an overview of energy-harvesting technologies and devices with
an emphasis on piezoelectric and electromechanical vibration
energy harvesters.
At the podium
Roger Tipley, a senior technologist/engineering
strategist at Hewlett-Packard, will present "Opportunities
for Energy Efficiency Innovation in the Power Electronics
Industry" as the opening day keynote. Tipley also is a board
member of the Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org).
This consortium of IT companies and professionals seeks to
lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around
the globe. It was chartered to develop meaningful, platformneutral
standards, measurement methods, processes, and
new technologies to improve the energy-efficient performance
of global data centers.
Thomas Valliere,vice president and cofounder
of Design Chain Associates, will present the second
day's keynote, "Update on China RoHS." He
will point out the differences between China's
restrictions and the EU's RoHS directives with
special emphasis on catalogue, marking, and
disclosure requirements.
Get back on track
The conference will
also provide seminars and technical sessions each
day, with the sessions arranged in a series of tracks.
One of the hour-long seminars, "Synchronous
Rectification Technique: Classification, Review, Comparison,"
led by Rais Miftakhutdinov, senior member
of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, will cover
design issues that need to be solved to meet practical requirements.
Specifically, this seminar will examine pre-biased voltage
startup; reliable operation at wide input voltage and load
current range; accurate timing while driving synchronous rectifier
MOSFETs; and preventing current circulation during parallel
operation.
During the two-hour technical sessions, industry experts will
present papers on such topics as "Power Design & Management"
and "Emerging Applications." The latter session will
include such papers as:
- "Powering the Next Generation of AMD Opteron Processors"
by George Schuellein, a director at International Rectifier
- "Current Sharing Approaches to Meet High-Power PoE
Requirements" by Ramesh Khanna, principal power applications
engineer at National Semiconductor
- "Wide Vin Range Power Supply Design for Power over Ethernet
plus Auxiliary Inputs" by Robert L. Selders, staff applications
engineer at National Semiconductor
- "Powering Next-Generation CMOS Loads" by Paul Greenland,
vice president of marketing at Enpirion and session chair
Besides the seminars and technical sessions, there will be
much more to do, with more than 80 exhibitors in attendance
and several product teardowns scheduled. The conference will
run from October 30 to November 1 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas.
For more, go to www.powerelectronicsshow.com.