PowerSource

May 13 2008 11:50AM | Permalink | Email this | Comments (0) |
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Electronic system designers have been blind-sided in recent years by the sudden need to incorporate sophisticated power supplies. Five short years ago digital electronics application designers could concentrate on their digital hardware specialty along with the software to run it, and that took care of 99% of the design challenges for a new electronics product, be it consumer, portable, home appliances, or even laptop/desktop compute systems. Power needs were taken care of by a cheap, poor-efficiency external adapter, or perhaps e similarly inefficient internal linear power supply. Energy was cheap, and neither consumers nor government regulators cared about wasted energy.

Cheap energy is gone. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates a federal standard for external power supplies, and this year, the US Department of Energy’s Energy Star label, a voluntary certification, established minimum power efficiency as well as power factor compliance for most power supplies, both internal and external.

Design teams must now develop design expertise in arcane specialties of power supply efficiency and power factor correction. Analog IC vendors, such as Texas Instruments, Maxim, Power Integration, and Linear Tech, have introduced many ICs which address just these problems, but these ICs have to be selected to match the application as well as matched with magnetics, heat sinks, EMI filters, and on and on. Using them is not a cook-book solution.

By purchasing Commergy Technologies, a 13-person Irish power supply reference design company, TI is recognizing that its value-add in the power supply space has to go beyond cool new power management ICs and address the knowledge gap that exists in the electronics design world. Commergy’s expertise in creating these reference designs includes planar magnetics, power factor correction, power topology design, thermal management, and EMC design. What TI has purchased is an integrated outsourcing path for its customers’ power subsystem designs.

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