Welcome to the June issue of Power Systems Design Europe. June marks the end of the first half of the year, and so far it has been a busy year for the industry. Personally I’ve been to both APEC in Atlanta and PCIM in Nuremberg, finding out about the latest innovation in the industry. I’ll be writing about the best of those new releases in my weekly TechTalk column. If you haven’t signed up to receive the newsletter, you are missing out on some pretty good technical content from some of the industry’s most knowledgeable figures.
At the two exhibitions mentioned above, as well as elsewhere on my travels, there have been three applications that regularly come up as the main areas of innovation – EVs and infrastructure, data centres and motor control. Motor control is perhaps the one we cover least in this magazine, but currently it has the biggest impact on power usage. According to the first article in this month’s Special Report, submitted by Navitas, electric motors and drives consume 45% of the total energy generated worldwide. We hear much more on data centres, but they only currently consume less than 3% of the global electricity generated, although that figure is expected to expand dramatically in the coming decade as new AI processors come online.
The electrical motor industry is already heavily regulated in terms of power usage, especially in the EU, where frequent updates to standards ensure that both the motors themselves and the circuits that drive them are as efficient as possible. And as usual, as soon as efficiency is mentioned, everyone looks to wide bandgap semiconductors. In the motor control industry, integrating these devices is not as simple as in other areas, as the heavily inductive load means that ultra-fast switching has both upsides and downsides. The first two articles in this month’s Special Report look at implementing GaN solutions for motor control.
In the first article, Navitas uses a 600W washing machine to demonstrate the benefits of the company’s GaN-based inverter using GaNSense Motor Drive ICs versus a normal IGBT intelligent power module solution. It also takes time to describe how GaN-based systems can be optimized to provide superior performance and protection. The second article in the Special Report comes from Cambridge GaN Devices, who provide a different take on the same subject by describing how the company’sIceGaN devices can deliver the benefits of GaN as a drop-in solution, using existing drivers.
The third and final article in this month’s Special Report is from TI and it looks at how accurate voltage and current sensing is key to building the next generation of robotic applications.
As well as the articles in the Special Report, this month’s magazine also contains general articles of interest to power designers in our Tech Focus section and the latest news and views from the industry.
Best Regards,
Ally Winning
European Editor, PSD
