2023 PowerBest Awards: Power Conversion and Management

Jan. 18, 2024

Electronic Design's Lee Goldberg attempts to chronicle a year of remarkable advances in power technology with an overstuffed baker's dozen of 2023's most notable products in three categories. Next up is Power Conversion and Management.

Lee Goldberg

Related To: Electronic Design

Single-Chip Intelligent Battery-Management Solutions Support Up to 20 Cells

The PAC22140 and PAC25140 Power Application Controller (PAC) devices were developed by Qorvo to help simplify the management of large battery packs used in power tools, lawn mowers, and other high-power applications. Originally featured in the March 2023 edition of PowerBites, the two PACs are the industry’s first single-chip solutions to offer support for battery packs with up to 20 cells in series (20s).

These products are designed to work seamlessly with Qorvo's intelligent motor-control hardware and firmware ecosystem to enable intelligent battery-management solutions for a wide range of industrial, e-mobility, and battery-backup applications.

The PAC22140 and PAC25140 use co-packaging technology to integrate all essential analog and power-management peripherals with a 32-bit Arm Cortex-M0 or -M4F microcontroller to support charging, cell balancing, monitoring, and protection for 10s-20s battery packs.

Included are a programmable-gain differential amplifier, multiple 16-bit sigma-delta ADCs for current and voltage sensing, and a 10-bit SAR ADC. A single-supply, 145-V buck DC-DC controller generates a 5-V system rail to power the device, while an integrated charge pump supports the charge and discharge FET drivers. As a result, the devices can help designers reduce their solution's PCB footprint by more than 50% and lower total BOM cost by 30%.

Slide 5 of 5

This article is part of the This Week in PowerBites Library Series.

What you’ll learn:

Energy efficiency, integration, and innovation were the primary drivers behind 2023's remarkable advances in power electronics.
WBG (SiC and GaN) semiconductor technologies have matured rapidly over the past year, as demonstrated by a growing number of products that are more highly integrated and make designing with these devices as easy as their silicon counterparts.
As the power sector adjusts to its accelerated rate of development, we’re seeing significant advances in power-related design tools, as well as the devices themselves.

2023 was another remarkably busy year for the power sector, marked by unusually high levels of technical innovation and new product introductions within nearly every application category. This year, we even saw some notable developments in passive components and design tools, making it even more difficult than usual to trim down our long list of deserving candidates for this year's PowerBest awards.

Despite our best efforts to hold the final list of awards to our traditional dozen, a surge in the number of promising power-related products and technologies added an additional two entries to our 2023 PowerBest honoree roster. We've broken them down into three rough categories for easier navigation:

Power Devices
Power Conversion and Management
Power Applications

Electronic Design offers our congratulations to this year's PowerBest winners. And a deep thanks goes out to the many other worthy candidates who made the selection process so challenging!

Here are the winners in the Power Conversion and Management category:

Read more articles in the This Week in PowerBites Library Series.

About the Author

Lee Goldberg | Contributing Editor

Lee Goldberg is a self-identified “Recovering Engineer,” Maker/Hacker, Green-Tech Maven, Aviator, Gadfly, and Geek Dad. He spent the first 18 years of his career helping design microprocessors, embedded systems, renewable energy applications, and the occasional interplanetary spacecraft. After trading his ‘scope and soldering iron for a keyboard and a second career as a tech journalist, he’s spent the next two decades at several print and online engineering publications.

Lee’s current focus is power electronics, especially the technologies involved with energy efficiency, energy management, and renewable energy. This dovetails with his coverage of sustainable technologies and various environmental and social issues within the engineering community that he began in 1996. Lee also covers 3D printers, open-source hardware, and other Maker/Hacker technologies.

Lee holds a BSEE in Electrical Engineering from Thomas Edison College, and participated in a colloquium on technology, society, and the environment at Goddard College’s Institute for Social Ecology. His book, “Green Electronics/Green Bottom Line - A Commonsense Guide To Environmentally Responsible Engineering and Management,” was published by Newnes Press.

Lee, his wife Catherine, and his daughter Anwyn currently reside in the outskirts of Princeton N.J., where they masquerade as a typical suburban family.

Lee also writes the regular PowerBites series.