Ed Bloom: Lifetime Achievement Award Winner

Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM
By David Morrison, Editor

When Ed Bloom began his engineering career in the 1960s, power-supply design was largely a self-taught subject with no formal instruction available and few reference materials to guide engineers embarking on switchmode power-supply (SMPS) designs. And if power-supply design was obscure, then magnetics design was even more obscure. So, like others working in industry at the time, Bloom mastered the “black art” of magnetics design to complete numerous power-supply projects.

But those early years spent developing power supplies for missile programs, spacecraft, defense projects and computers were just the beginning. Bloom later made his mark as an entrepreneur, instructor and author. In these roles, he labored extensively to demystify the black art of magnetics, enabling countless engineers to learn the principles of magnetics design and even the latest advances, including those he pioneered.

Chief among those advances was Bloom's development of integrated magnetics — the combination of multiple magnetic structures on a single core. For his work in this area, Bloom has been called the “Father of Integrated Magnetics.” Although Bloom has authored multiple patents and conference papers based on his work in this area, his most well-known writing on the magnetics topic may be found in the now-classic textbook Modern DC-to-DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits, which Bloom co-authored with Rudy Severns.[1]

Bloom was among the first to realize the industry's need for formal but practical power electronics education. He responded in an entrepreneurial spirit, and together with his wife, Joy, expanded his consulting business, e/j Bloom associates, to host some of the first courses on topics such as power-magnetics design, power-supply control methods and stability analysis. Bloom took power electronics education to the engineer, repeating his classes in different cities across the country. Though he enlisted other experts to teach various subjects, Bloom himself taught many advanced classes on magnetics design, introducing numerous engineers to the principles of integrated magnetics design as well as those of planar magnetics.

Through his business, he also provided power electronics engineers with a unique source of specialty books, videos, design software and development tools that helped them to ply their trade. This mail-order segment of the business started in the 1980s, but made an early transition into the Internet age, transforming into a virtual power electronics storefront with the launch of his website in 1994.

Meanwhile, e/j Bloom associates continued to be an outlet for Bloom's consulting services, through which he assisted many well-known but unnameable corporate clients in troubleshooting their power-supply design and manufacturing problems.

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© 2007 Penton Media, Inc.