Driving Home for Christmas

Welcome to the December edition of Power Systems Design Europe. I would like to take this opportunity to wish all our readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year from everyone here at PSD. We really appreciate you choosing to read the magazine every month. For the industry, it has generally been a good year although the economy has been a bit unpredictable. Looking forward to next year, inflation and interest rates should come down to make things a little easier.

Power electronics are at the heart of all of the main technological advances going on at the moment, whether it is enabling renewable energy solutions to replace fossil fuels, powering the most complex and demanding processors for the AI revolution, or being incorporated into tiny sensor clusters to provide the data for the IoT. These applications have challenged engineers to innovate, and perhaps none more so than the electrification of transportation. 

Consumers make almost unrealistic demands on EV designs in terms of range and recharging, but the industry is rising to meet those challenges. We will look at how that is being achieved inside of our Automotive and Transportation Special Report this month. The first article in the Special Report comes from Analog Devices, and it gives an overview of where the company is at the moment in terms of automotive design. According to the author, Patrick Morgan, Corporate Vice President at the company, governments can provide encouragement and incentives, but EV adoption can only really be solved by technology. He then goes on to talk about ADI Recharge, the company’s solutions for automotive technology, with a particular focus on its wireless battery management system and the benefits that it brings to EV owners.

Batteries are one the area that can make or break the design of an EV, and the second article in the Special Report, which comes from Mouser, also focuses on battery management. This feature, written by Mark Patrick looks at the problems of designing a single, removable battery pack that could be used in different automotive designs. The article then discusses each important metric that affects EV battery cells and the components that can be used for the task.

The final feature in this month’s Special Report comes from Navitas and it looks at how wide bandgap semiconductors are changing the automotive industry. While SiC is more usually associated with the heavy-duty work required in the drivetrain, there are still a lot of important applications where GaN can make a difference. In the article, Llew Vaughan-Edmunds, Sr. Director at Navitas Semiconductor talks about how trench-assisted planar-gate technology improves SiC performance in EV applications, and how the company’s new GaNSafe devices can make a real difference to automotive efficiency.

As well as the features in the Special Report, we have general power articles in our Technology Focus section and news and views from around the industry. I hope you enjoy.

Enjoy the December issue!

Best Regards,

Ally Winning

European Editor, PSD