Part Two: Where Have All the Gurus Gone?

Mar 23, 2007 2:24 PM
By Lou Pechi, President, STRATA - Strategic Advisors, San Diego, Calif.

The story of the people who developed power supplies over the last several decades continues in this second part. 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 (DPA).

As the market demanded numerous voltages on a single circuit board, the power-system architecture evolved into the intermediate bus architecture (IBA). Another form of distributed power architecture, IBA employs an isolated dc-dc converter to provide the bus voltage to many nonisolated dc-dc point-of-load converters (POLs) located next to the devices they power. Artesyn, with the capacity of low-cost overseas manufacturing, quickly dominated that market.

Around 2000, Power-One, sensing the need to combine power conversion, control and communication into a single, easy-to-use system set up shop in a new Silicon Valley location. There it developed a family of digitally controlled POLs and devices to manage them.

To execute the development of digital POLs and power management requires the combined disciplines of digital semiconductor design and analog dc-dc converter design. At Power-One, two key individuals, Dennis Roark and Alain Chapuis, with a team of digital semiconductor designers developed the first digital POL power conversion and management system and introduced it in 2004, two years ahead of the competition.

At the same time, Patrizio Vincerelli, working on a stealth project, developed the factorized power solution that attempts to turn the whole approach to on-board distributed power on its head. Most IBA systems normally have a single isolated dc-dc converter providing the bus voltages to the nonisolated converters placed next to the ICs. Vicor’s system, on the other hand, distributes higher nonisolated voltages across the circuit board to power isolated converters placed close to the devices they power.

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© 2007 Penton Media, Inc.