Military, Aerospace & Hi-Rel

September 2015

KEMET's gold-plated termination options in its high-temperature 200 degrees Celsius ceramic capacitors

KEMET launches gold-plated terminations for harsh apps

KEMET introduced a series of gold plated termination options to its high temperature 200 degrees Celsius ceramic capacitor product lines. Gold terminations were developed to accommodate mission critical, high reliability and high temperature applications where the use of pure tin and tin-lead plating may compromise lo

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Date:

09/28/2015

Core Loss Modeling – Part I

Dr. Ray Ridley, President, Ridley Engineering

As modern power converters move towards higher efficiencies, it is essential to have better models for all of the loss mechanisms in your components. We have talked about winding loss effects in several articles. Magnetics core loss modeling is an area that needs improvement. Magnetics B-H Loops As freq

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Date:

09/26/2015

Evolving eGaN FETs for power electronics

Johan Strydom, Efficient Power Conversion

When I started working with eGaN FETs almost six years ago, I had no idea what to expect from this technology. We had our first preliminary datasheet and even though I had no idea what to expect, it was obvious that, on paper, these devices were much better than your typical MOSFETs – already beyond the theoretical si

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Date:

09/26/2015

Selecting primary-side MOSFETs for LLC resonant converters

Wonsuk Choi, Fairchild Semiconductor

Today’s industrial applications demand power supplies capable of delivering ever-higher levels of power density. That trend is escalating as regulatory agencies around the world impose new regulations to achieve higher efficiency, not only at full load, but also in standby mode and across the entire load spectrum. To

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Date:

09/26/2015

System optimization – less is more

Björn Rentemeister and Uwe Jansen, Infineon Technologies

The “Energiewende” (energy transition) has resulted in a shift in thinking not only about the generation of electrical energy, but its distribution and consumption as well. Efficient approaches are needed for energy production and transfer on the one hand, and consumption on the other. What plays a role he

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Date:

09/26/2015

Addressing power dissipation and density issues

Maithil Pachchigar, Analog Devices

Many applications in industrial, instrumentation, optical communication and healthcare industry use multi-channel data acquisition systems that result in increased printed circuit board (PCB) density and thermal power dissipation challenges. The need for increased channel density in these applications is

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Date:

09/26/2015

Balancing lead-acid batteries

Aspiyan Gazder, Linear Technology

Lead-acid batteries are widely used in a broad range of industries and applications. The telecom industry uses a series stack of four lead-acid batteries to provide a 48V stack. Energy storage solutions (ESS) use lead-acid batteries in a variety of series and parallel configurations to store energy generated by

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Date:

09/26/2015

Exploring energy monitoring

Christopher Gobok, Linear Technology

Energy is often defined as the amount of power consumed over time, measured in joules (J) or kilowatt-hours (kWh), whereas power is a constant rate of energy usage, measured in watts (W). Thus, while a power rating is typically used to indicate how much electricity a device will consume at a snapshot in ti

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Date:

09/17/2015

Increasing density in power modules

James Lougheed and Alan Elbanhawy, Exar

The power module market has seen explosive growth in the past few years. With growth rates of roughly 30% compounded annually, it’s a trend that many people are watching. Power modules are a new breed of products in the market that are LGA or QFN based, closed frame power supplies that include the controller, dr

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Date:

09/16/2015

DesignSpark Electrical

RS Components offers electrical design software for engineering professionals

RS Components (RS), the trading brand of Electrocomponents, a distributor for engineers, announced the launch of DesignSpark Electrical, which brings the benefits of design software to all those not already using electrical CAD tools. The new software targets electrical design engineers and other electrical pr

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Date:

09/07/2015

Test considerations for variable-frequency drives

David Maliniak, Teledyne LeCroy

Motors are everywhere in our world, it seems. Consider our vehicles, for example. When is the last time you had to hand-crank a car window up and down to pay a highway toll? Or, for that matter, when did you last manually adjust the seat position or rear-view mirror angles? Typically, motors drive all of these as

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Date:

09/02/2015

Maximizing energy efficiency in the IoT

Markus Levy of EEMBC and Rob Cosaro of Freescale

The Internet of Things (IoT) represents a class of devices referred to as edge nodes; these require a battery life ranging from weeks to months to decades. An edge node typically contains a microcontroller to perform processing (e.g. encryption, compression, error correction, protocol stack), in addition to a

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Date:

09/02/2015

A look at PSRR and low-performance control loops

Dr. Ray Ridley, President, Ridley Engineering

Modern power converters are moving towards high efficiency, high density, and high switching frequencies. Vendors of power supplies are doing an outstanding job of meeting these goals with a range of new technologies. At the same time, despite the use of advanced control chip technology, many control loops have su

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Date:

09/01/2015