Inside the Industry: Lou Pechi

In this collection of online monthly features, industry veteran Lou Pechi discusses hot-button issues affecting the power electronics industry.

Are There Too Many Power Management ICs?

Over the holidays, I cleared some of my files and came across the “Power Management IC Wallchart 2007” published last year in the Power Electronics Technology publication. The chart listed about 37 different management ICs with only five...

Part One: Power Distribution Leads to Multiple On-Board Bus Paths

Forecasting trends is like walking on ice. The closer you are to the shore, where the ice is thickest, the more solid your predictions are. By carefully examining and then projecting trends, without stepping too far onto the thin ice, we just might catch a glimpse of the power-handling progress that will be achieved by 2020. ...

Answers to Energy Crisis Are Blowin' in the Wind

The wind is a form of solar power that has been converted to mechanical energy. Just as the sunshine does not shine all the time, the wind does not blow all the time. The more the wind blows, the more power that can be produced by the wind turbines....

Let the Sunshine In

In the past, power-supply designers concentrated mainly on designing devices that convert high ac voltages to stable, low dc voltages. Today, such devices perform these tasks at ever-increasing efficiencies and increased capabilities of intelligent communication with each other, to provide higher reliability power conversion. ...

Digital Diet Slims Your Power Designs

During the last 40 years, Moore’s Law has been the main driver for the power-supply industry. In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore noted that the power consumption of a chip doubles every 24 months. ...

Part One: The Electric Grid—Now and in the Future

Think about the pervasiveness of the global electrical network. It is a truly remarkable achievement. Like a gigantic octopus it envelops the whole earth and through its uncountable number of tentacles delivers, just in the United States, over 4 trillion KWh of electricity per year....

Part Two: The Electric Grid—Now and in the Future

Guest columnist Lou Pechi considers the possible impact of recent trends on the electrical grid and speculates as to where the grid may be headed in the future....

GUI – A Crutch or an Aid?

What has happened to the old Bode plots, loop stability calculations and the Venable instruments with their gain frequency displays of loop gain and phase shift versus frequency. Have the designers gone soft on us and lost their ability to design without the proper software?...

Part One: Where Have All the Gurus Gone?

Looking back over the last five decades, one can realize the tremendous progress our power-supply industry has made. Driving this progress are the customers who require better, smaller and more efficient power supplies, and the creative innovators designing the new products....

Part Two: Where Have All the Gurus Gone?

In the previous article we covered the progress from linear power supplies to switchers and the move of power conversion from a central system location to power-conversion devices mounted on circuit boards. This transition is often described as a move from a centralized power architecture to a distributed power architecture....