Part One: Where Have All the Gurus Gone?

Feb 22, 2007 10:19 AM
By Lou Pechi, President, STRATA - Strategic Advisors, San Diego

Looking back over the last five decades, one can realize the tremendous progress our power-supply industry has made. Efficiencies nearly touching the magic 100% limit are the norm, and digital power is making inroads into many of the new designs. Driving this progress are the customers who require better, smaller and more efficient power supplies, and the creative innovators, buried deep in their companies’ laboratories, inventing the and designing the new products.

But who are these innovators? What has happened to them? Where are they today?

To list them all would take too much space, so I will attempt to jog my memory and talk about the innovators I have had the privilege of knowing or meeting.

In the early seventies, Lambda, where Sol Gindoff was one of the principal engineers, introduced a line of standardized linear power supplies. These power supplies were marketed by Merrill Simon, Lambda’s vice president of marketing, in a series of mass-marketed, two-page glossy newspaper ads that pictured Merrill with a cigar in his mouth and the power supply in his hand.

Then, the market began to demand products that could operate on both domestic and higher international voltages. Dick Weise, at the time an engineer with Powertec, recognized this need, but found that Powertec was unwilling to add dual-voltage windings to its power supplies. In response, Weise left Powertec to establish Power-One, which would build power supplies with domestic and foreign voltage ranges.

Around the same time, Walt Hirschberg at AC/DC was developing a new line of standard, form and fit linear power supplies not only to meet the dual-voltage standards, but also the stricter isolation requirements.

With the ability to use power supplies from any one of these and many smaller companies, the competition for power-supply customers became fierce. To compete in the market and because it was unable to purchase TO3 transistors from RCA, Lambda, under the guidance of Merrill Simon, started its own fabrication in Corpus Christi, Texas, to build state-of-the-art Darlington transistors.

By the late 1970s, switching power supplies quickly started to replace inefficient linears. In 1967, Robert Okada of RO Associates had designed the first commercial 20-kHz, 50-W switching power supply. Prior to this, switching power supplies were custom-designed products developed mainly for military and aerospace applications.

In the mid-1970s, switching power supplies made further headway, thanks to efforts by Bob Boschert at Boschert Inc., to power some of the early daisy wheel and band printers. Boschert developed a switching power supply, aptly named “The Meatloaf,” that bolted on the back of the Diablo band printer. Within a few years, Cherokee, under the guidance of Pat Patel, and Power-One, under the engineering direction of Steve Goldman, followed with similar form-factor midpower designs of multiple-output power supplies.

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© 2007 Penton Media, Inc.