Hopefully, all is well wherever you are based and things are returning to normal. March marks the start of Spring, and it is usually a time that is full on for the industry, with APEC, the largest power show in the Americas scheduled at the end of the month. APEC will return to an in-person format this year, so hopefully it can pick up where it left off before the pandemic. One thing attendees are bound to hear a lot about at the event is wide-bandgap materials, and its no wonder as companies continue to push the technology further and further.
If you are interested in wide-bandgap technology, PSD’s TechTalk section is an in-depth view of the latest news stories, and during the last month there has been a focus on both SiC and GaN advances. For example, on the SiC side, we have covered Power Integration’s launch of a new 1,700V InnoSwitch3-AQ device, with input from the company’s director of automotive business development, Peter Vaughan. On GaN, we have recently had an interview with Dr. Denis Marcon, General Manager of Innoscience Europe on the company’s capabilities and its branching into Europe, and also a discussion with Thierry Bouchet, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Wise-integration on how the company’s half-bridge power 650V GaN power switch works in combination with its WiseWare firmware to bring tight digital control to the wide-bandgap market. There is a weekly update on the website and I’d appreciate it if you could take a little time to look, and subscribe to the newsletter if you like what you see. You can find the section here.
In the magazine this month, we also look at wide-bandgap materials in our Special Report. The first article in the Special Report was written by Patrick Le Fèvre, Powerbox’s Chief Marketing Officer. In the article, Patrick takes a look at how far wide-bandgap materials have come. It is an interesting take, which picks out some of the market-changing devices over the last half-decade. These groundbreaking devices include Navitas GaNFast power ICs, that when combined with a planar transformer, made Oppo’s breakthrough 50W powerbrick possible. The whole charger measures only 82.2 x 39.0 x 10.5 mm and weighs 60g. That charger laid the groundwork for further innovation, leading to today’s USB chargers, which are even more powerful. For example, the charger for my Hauwei laptop is around the same size and has almost double the power capability at 90W.
The second article in the special Report this month comes from Power Integrations. Here, Roland Saint Pierre, the company’s Director of New Product Definition talks about the use of passive clamping with complementary and non-complementary active clamping solutions and introduces PI’s Innoswitch4-CZ/ClampZero chipset that enables the use of non-complementary clamping and the design of super-dense flyback power supplies.
I hope you enjoy.
Best Regards,
Ally Winning
European Editor, PSD
