ZigBee Green Power, introduced by the ZigBee Alliance, is an energy-harvesting, battery-free feature set designed to create a global, standard technology for self-powered devices. Without needing wires or batteries, according to the Alliance, these new devices are compatible with ZigBee and ZigBee PRO networks and can enable maintenance-free, environmentally friendly products.

Power supplies not only need to be powerful and efficient, they also must meet performance and reliability requirements for rugged and demanding environments, such as military and medical applications. Two European companies are rising to the occasion, with the SL Power Electronics MINT1110 series and the Powersolve Electronics PSL400BP.

Designed for telecom and computing systems, the Texas Instruments TPS54620 SWIFT single-chip point-of-load device (POL) sustains up to 17 V. As an addition to its other power-management ICs, this 6-A synchronous switcher features integrated FETs. It’s 60% smaller than multi-chip converters, according to TI, takes up less than 195 mm², and is one-fourth the size of a postage stamp.

ON Semiconductor’s NUC2401MN common-mode choke and electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection IC is designed for high-speed data line applications. According to the company, this device rids the low-voltage differential signaling (LVDS) interfaces of common mode noise, which becomes necessary when working with high bandwidth.

Agilent Technologies has introduced its N8700 series of dc power supplies. With capabilities identical to the N5700 series, the company says it has improved upon the older model with more than eight times the power density. This new series’ power density, at 5200 W in a 2U-high (2-EIA rack unit) package, also has PC-standard I/O with LAN (LXI-C), USB, and GPIB included.

System-on-a-chip (SoC) design teams have long labored to optimize their creations for power, but doing so in the memory portions of the devices has lagged behind. Today’s memory-IP (intellectual property) providers build complex power-management schemes into their products, yet the design of the control logic to take maximum advantage of these schemes is daunting. Attempts to get a handle on dynamic power consumption using sleep modes are...

In embedded applications that use the PC architecture, the USB interface has supplanted RS-232 for remote control, diagnostics, firmware updates, configuration of operational settings, and data exchange. As with its predecessor, one drawback to USB in medical and certain industrial applications is the lack of a provision for isolation in the basic standard, though mains-powered patient monitors require it for safety cer tification, and...

The automobile and electronics industries are struggling mightily through this economic tumult. Straddling these two giants, however, is a shining beacon—auto electronics. At last year’s Convergence Conference, a panel of experts from General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, and BMW suggested that the cost of electronics in a car will increase beyond the oft-quoted 20% figure and climb to 40% to 50%. Getting more extreme, Honda senior...

Monitoring the current taken by a mains-powered appliance can be a challenge, particularly if the application demands an inexpensive solution that must provide galvanic isolation for user safety. Common solutions employ either a current-sense resistor or current-sense transformer to convert the line current to an ac voltage that’s then converted into a proportional dc voltage. The dc voltage may then be processed using various techniques to provide a...

Linear Technology’s LT3092 is a 0.5- to 200-mA, twoterminal, low-temperature-coefficient, constant-current- source IC. Conceptually, it’s simple, but there has never been an IC like it. You can build various circuits to provide the same functionality, yet never before could you have bought a standalone IC that does the job so simply and elegantly. Questions arise. What’s it good for? Why didn’t anybody make one before this? How did Linear come to develop...

The IEEE recently presented a panel discussion with some of its most esteemed fellows and members to celebrate its 125th anniversary. Panelists included Miguel Nicolelis of the Duke University Medical Center, Katie Hall of WiTricity, Rangachar Kasturi of the University of South Florida, K.J. Ray Liu of the University of Maryland, Dharmendra Modha of IBM's Almaden Research Center Krishna Palem of Rice University, and Roy Want of Intel.

After the Roadster test drive, I had a serendipitous interview with Tesla’s CTO, J.B. Straubel, during MIT’s annual Emerging Technology conference. In the video interview, Straubel shares info about the upcoming Tesla sedan and the new factory slated to be built in San Jose.

Getting to take a test ride in a Tesla Roadster is a thrill enough, but getting Bob Pease out for a spin as well—talk about an experience! Our Analog and Power Editor Don Tuite just so happens to married to Vicky Tuite, senior test engineer at Tesla Motors. Talk about lucky. She recently had the keys to a brilliant orange Tesla with the enviable mission of running down the batteries for some low-charge tests the next day. And guess who got to ride shotgun.

The main source of power in a telecommunications system is -48 V. This source’s negative polarity and its large magnitude with respect to ground pose a challenge when designers want to use low-power ICs in the telecom system’s application circuits. Fortunately, the emergence of high-voltage ICs—with operating voltages of 75 V and higher—has enabled the use of simple biasing techniques in designing circuits for -48-V systems. The technique described here provides...

In today’s world, there are many applications for portable devices. These devices must have extremely low or no battery drain when turned off and need to charge their on-board batteries when connected to an external power supply, whether the device is turned on or not. This circuit provides seamless switching from batteries to external power and provides a simple charging solution. In addition, there are several output signals for a microcontroller (MCU). This...

This Idea For Design provides an alternative to an earlier IFD that noted that Spice does not have a device model for an ideal transformer (“A Spice Model For The Ideal Transformer”). The author explained, “Instead, Spice provides a coupled-inductor model in the K statement that includes self and mutual inductances.” The author’s proposed solution is a model that...

A Schottky diode is an excellent way to connect multiple batteries or dc power supplies to a load. With a forward-biased “or” diode between each supply and the load, faults are isolated. Weak, low, or shorted supplies can’t sink current from the other supplies. Unfortunately, the heat produced by a diode can be difficult to remove in some applications. This circuit was created to reduce the heat dissipated by a power-supply “or” diode in a redundant 50-V...

Driving multiple LEDs with one microprocessor GPIO pin is a well-known technique. Typically, designs perform this task by issuing pulse widths and clocks of differing durations and employing multiple RC networks to distinguish between them. The design described here is much simpler. The microprocessor pin is connected to the clock of a multipleoutput sequential counter (see the figure). In its...