Lighting & Illumination

May 2015

Improving efficiency and reducing costs in solar inverters

Jon Firth & James Kerr, Microsemi

A niche market only a few years ago, the solar photovoltaic (PV) industry is now becoming a mainstream electricity provider, and changing the way the world is powered. Following a difficult period of industry consolidation and economic crisis, PV installations saw another record year in 2013, with more than 38

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Date:

05/29/2015

Advances in energy-harvesting power conversion

Frederik Dostal, Analog Devices

Energy harvesting has been around for a very long time. I still remember my 1980s pocket calculator with a solar cell powering the computing unit as well as the LCD display. But even much before that, usable energy was harvested in the early days of the electrical revolution with putting generators on river mi

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Date:

05/29/2015

The advantages of batteryless power

Frank Schmidt, CTO and co-founder, EnOcean

Many fields of research focus on achieving a combination of more powerful batteries and devices that consume less and less energy. However, Moore's law does not apply to batteries. The performance and component density of processors and memory chips double approximately every 18 months. Gordon E. Moore pred

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Date:

05/29/2015

Alix Paultre, Editorial Director, PSD

Designing the future

Alix Paultre, Editorial Director, PSD

The first modern wave of rapid human development, also known as the first industrial revolution, began in the middle of the 18th century. The development of devices that could be used to magnify a human’s capabilities immediately changed the face of the planet, impacting everything from agriculture to warfare. T

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Date:

05/29/2015

Designing for optimum power conversion

Tobias Gerber, Infineon Technologies

Today’s power conversion and power management applications demand compact yet robust power switching circuitry that supports high-voltage, high-frequency operation with the minimum of losses from the smallest possible PCB area. By definition, the choice of MOSFET technology has a significant impact on how su

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Date:

05/29/2015

Jim Witham, CEO, GaN Systems

Towards a new era in power electronics

Jim Witham, CEO, GaN Systems

GaN material offers orders of magnitude improvement in switching and conduction performance and, when produced on GaN-on-Silicon substrates, can reduce power system costs. Only diamond power semiconductors have been proposed as a superior material system to GaN, but the consensus is that we are decades aw

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Date:

05/28/2015

Optimizing foil windings for power magnetics

Dr. Ray Ridley, President, Ridley Engineering

As power levels are increased and output voltages drop, it is common to have just a few turns in the windings of inductors and transformers. When this happens, standard round wires are usually not the best choice for building magnetic structures, and foil is often used. With a foil winding, the width of the fo

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Date:

05/28/2015

Designing efficient energy systems

Tom Colella, Electrocube

We thought it would be helpful to assemble a top five list of the most common mistakes or “don’ts” that occur during the design of efficient power systems – and how to avoid them. This information comes from our observations and yes, some of our own experiences during Electrocube’s 50-plus years in th

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Date:

05/28/2015

Boost system performance with the right DC/DC converter

Meng He, Maxim Integrated

Did you know that every 10°C rise in ambient temperature reduces every component’s lifetime by 50%? That power supplies with drop-offs or variances can lead to premature failures and even completely fried parts in your system? Indeed, most agree that power-intensive applications need, and really must have, lo

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Date:

05/28/2015

Digital power system management

Tony Armstrong, Linear Technology

System architects of embedded systems, networking, and datacom equipment are constantly being pushed to increase the data throughput and performance of their systems as well as add functionality and features. At the same time, pressure is being applied to decrease the system’s overall power consumption. For ex

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Date:

05/28/2015

OMICRON Lab zeigt die Stabilitätsmessung eines LED Treibers auf der PCIM 2015 (German Language PSDtv)

In diesem Episode von PSDtv beschreibt OMICRON Lab ihre Lösung für die Messung der Schleifenverstärkung eines Regelkreises in einem LED Automobil Scheinwerfer auf der PCIM 2015. In hochwertigen Automobilen werden komplexe Regelsysteme eingesetzt die unter anderem verhindern, dass die Lichter eines Autos b

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Date:

05/26/2015

Omicron describes an automotive LED power test solution at PCIM 2015 (PSDtv)

In this episode of PSDtv Omicron Lab explains their solution to measure loop gain in an automotive headlight LED driver at PCIM 2015 for Power Systems Design. It is difficult to set up a power system for automotive lighting, as the power fluctuations and noise inherent in vehicles can cause the lights to fli

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Date:

05/26/2015

9176 Series PTH connector

AVX releases single-contact through-hole IDC connector

AVX, a leading manufacturer of passive components and interconnect solutions, has added a single contact, wire-to-board (WTB) insulation displacement connector (IDC) with plated through hole (PTH) terminations to its proven 9176 Series, which, prior to the addition, was exclusively comprised of surface mount te

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Date:

05/14/2015