Interview with Peter Henry, Analog Devices, on Developments in Power Management
Recently, David Webster, editor and publisher of Battery Power Magazine sat down with Peter Henry, vice president and general manager, Power Management Group of Analog Devices, to discuss the evolution of power management and energy efficiency.
David:
Power management and energy efficient design are a key focus for product and system development teams today. In your view, Peter, how much has the capability to manage power advanced in the past few years?
Peter: Power has changed completely in the last decade. The landscape of power from the 1980’s and early 1990’s was dominated by NPN regulators, very simple circuits to take one voltage and change it to another voltage with very little intelligence and, frankly, very little efficiency. Power was cheap, it was plentiful, and portable devices were just barely starting to come online that actually had efficiency requirements.
Now, power has completely switched over from a dominant position of linear regulators to a dominant position of many different types of switching regulators. More and more you find switching regulators in packages that are tiny, often SOT packages that allow them to be used in applications where beforehand you used linear regulators. The impact on energy efficiency has been enormous. The energy efficiency of systems using linear regulators could be as low as 10 percent to 30 percent depending upon what your supplies were. But changing out to switching regulators has advanced us to 80 percent-plus efficiencies expected out of any power conversion technology nowadays.
David:
Given these tremendous advancements, what are the biggest opportunities today for improvement in power management and energy efficiency? In other words where should OEM design engineers be looking today for their biggest improvement in energy efficiency?
Peter:
There’s a wealth of switching regulators available from a number of different companies including Analog Devices and we’ve built a very strong portfolio of high efficiency switching regulators that service a large number of different needs from point of load to AC-DC requirements. Today the real opportunities for advancement come not so much in the power conversions, as much as in supplying power in a manner that integrates it as a complete system solution.
How does power interact with other components from a noise perspective or from an efficiency perspective and how can you change your system through the intelligent knowledge of what your power system is doing? For example, our ADP1043 which provides AC to DC power conversion and isolated DC to DC power conversion has a significant amount of intelligence embedded in the system. When you apply that intelligence, we can we reduce the power losses of a base station by 50 percent but that it is just the beginning. It also provides a lot of intelligence as to what is happening in the power conversion. A manufacturer can couple this intelligence with knowledge of what the signal chain requirements are to provide an additional 20 percent or 30 percent improvement in the total efficiency of the entire system. So the application of high efficiency power along with system knowledge of how power interacts with data convertors, amplifiers, data acquisition systems and other system characteristics provides the greatest opportunity for continuing improvement in system design.
David:
Peter, let’s focus in on some examples. Analog Devices has introduced a lot of power management products in the past year. Now I’m going to ask you to just pick two or three that you think illustrate particularly significant energy efficient advancements or improvements.
Peter:
Earlier I mentioned the ADP1043. It is a fantastic example of understanding the system requirements or infrastructure of power conversion issues for high powered systems, then applying unique and different algorithms. This is actually a digital powered component but it is designed to be manageable by engineers who don’t have to learn software to program a digital power component. So it allows a good power engineer to optimize the system from efficiency and from system performance parameters.
Another example relates to one of Analog Devices’ great strengths which is our position in data conversion. We have a 45 percent market share of data conversion products worldwide. Data conversion typically requires very, very low noise and well regulated power supplies to minimize the overall system waves. Oftentimes designers spend months optimizing their data acquisition system for linearity, noise performance and other issues only to find, when they add the power components, that all of the performance they’ve spent months on isn’t there anymore because of noise in the power supply, poor transient response and other issues involved in power supply design.
So what we’re doing is improving the intelligent design of a switching regulator. Our ADP2114 which is optimized for noise performance in data acquisition systems can allow a designer now to use a switching regulator instead of a linear regulator. Now, instead of having an intermediate bus going to linear regulators and a tremendous amount of filtering to get the same performance as those bench top supplies, we can use just a single switching regulator. We’ve already shown how a switching regulator will work with data acquisition systems to have very low noise, preserve all of the power performance and have the efficiency of a switching regulator so the system designer is able to achieve 80 percent-plus power efficiency as opposed to 30 percent to 50 percent on a linear regulator.
Overall, our focus has really been to optimize the system design characteristics of our power components. We’ve introduced more than 70 new products in the last six quarters. All of which are designed to optimize the system solution not just be a “poster-child” regulator.
David:
What’s ahead, Peter? We’ve made such significant strides in the past 10 years, what about in the next few years? Do you see continuing gains in the capabilities for energy efficiency?
Peter:
Absolutely. Energy efficiency is absolutely the number one design criteria in many of the companies that I work with. They are focused on the competitive advantage of doing things more efficiently in a lower power system. This ranges everywhere from portable devices where the benefit is a longer battery life up to high powered systems which is just straight dollars and cents of energy usage and heating issues. I believe that we are just at the forefront of how you integrate power and system knowledge to gain in energy efficiency. The solutions that we’ve recently introduced allow a much greater degree of interaction with the system than ever before possible. The replacement of linear regulators with low noise switching regulators will continue to gain momentum and replace more and more of the very messy energy losing, poor efficiency systems out there. And I think we’re going to see continuing gains as you can couple the system knowledge with power supply. Only a few companies can do that. There are many companies that can make regulators, there are a few companies that do signal chain really well, and only a tiny number of companies that are great at both.
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Power has changed completely in the last decade. The landscape of power from the 1980’s and early 1990’s was dominated by NPN regulators, very simple circuits to take one voltage and change it to another voltage with very little intelligence and, frankly, very little efficiency. Power was cheap, it was plentiful, and portable devices were just barely starting to come online that actually had efficiency requirements.
How does power interact with other components from a noise perspective or from an efficiency perspective and how can you change your system through the intelligent knowledge of what your power system is doing? For example, our ADP1043 which provides AC to DC power conversion and isolated DC to DC power conversion has a significant amount of intelligence embedded in the system. When you apply that intelligence, we can we reduce the power losses of a base station by 50 percent but that it is just the beginning. It also provides a lot of intelligence as to what is happening in the power conversion. A manufacturer can couple this intelligence with knowledge of what the signal chain requirements are to provide an additional 20 percent or 30 percent improvement in the total efficiency of the entire system. So the application of high efficiency power along with system knowledge of how power interacts with data convertors, amplifiers, data acquisition systems and other system characteristics provides the greatest opportunity for continuing improvement in system design.
So what we’re doing is improving the intelligent design of a switching regulator. Our ADP2114 which is optimized for noise performance in data acquisition systems can allow a designer now to use a switching regulator instead of a linear regulator. Now, instead of having an intermediate bus going to linear regulators and a tremendous amount of filtering to get the same performance as those bench top supplies, we can use just a single switching regulator. We’ve already shown how a switching regulator will work with data acquisition systems to have very low noise, preserve all of the power performance and have the efficiency of a switching regulator so the system designer is able to achieve 80 percent-plus power efficiency as opposed to 30 percent to 50 percent on a linear regulator.