green-techZONE Products for the week of November 24, 2003
Saving The World, One Watt At A Time - Power
Integrations DVD/Set-Top Box Power Supply Reference Design Enables 1-Watt
Standby
No Heatsink Required in New, Low Cost Power Supply Design
Built With Company's New 30 Watt Power Conversion IC
Power Integrations, whose energy efficient EcoSmart ICs enable consumer
electronics manufacturers to meet tightening energy efficiency guidelines
for standby and no-load operating conditions, announced today the availability
of a new Design Accelerator Kit (DAK-32) for applications such as DVD players/recorders
and set-top boxes. The DAK-32 features a cost effective, energy efficient
20 W power supply reference design that easily meets a one-watt standby
input power consumption and delivers enough peak power to start motors and
spin up drives found in DVD players and recorders.
"This is one more step in Power Integrations' ongoing strategy to use our EcoSmart energy efficient technology and our technical design support capability to enable extremely low no-load and standby power consumption," said Dan Selleck, Vice President of Marketing for Power Integrations. "As a result, manufacturers can meet all current and proposed worldwide energy efficiency guidelines for consumer electronic products."
The DAK-32 is the latest addition to a growing suite of application-oriented power supply design tools from the company. It contains a tested 20 W (25 W peak) universal input AC-DC power supply, PI Expert) design software, TOPSwitch-GX power conversion IC samples, and extensive design collateral. In standby mode, the multiple output supply draws less than one watt of input power at 230 VAC while supplying 0.5 W to its load.
The reference design uses a new member of the company's TOPSwitch-GX
IC family, the TOP245P, in a 7 pin DIP package capable of delivering up
to 30 W of continuous power without requiring a heatsink. By eliminating
the heatsink, power supply designers can benefit from a lower system cost
and greater reliability. Other high performance features of the TOP245P
include a high-voltage power MOSFET with PWM control, fault protection and
other control circuitry integrated onto a single CMOS chip, built-in soft-start,
132 kHz switching frequency (automatically reduced at light load), frequency
jittering for low EMI, wide maximum duty cycle, and hysteretic thermal shutdown.
analogZONE Says...
Since current estimates place standby power accounting for as much as 8% of domestic electricity consumption (I actually think it's more because of all the computers and printers) in the average home, we could make a significant dent in our consumption of fossil fuels used to make electricity if all electronic products adopted this technology. Heck -- we could probably come close to meeting the Kyoto Accords for carbon emission reduction with the adoption of this one technology.
But there is a less altruistic reason to take a close look at what Power Integrations has to offer: Sub-1 W standby power requirements about to be imposed by Japan, and many European countries will make it difficult or impossible to sell products that don't have the required power supplies.
But while using power supplies that offer sub-1 W standby consumption makes sense from an environmental perspective, many companies have been slow to adopt the technology. While some of this is attributable to simple inertia, much of the trouble is that traditional switching supplies have great efficiency at their rated loads, but it's really tough to keep them from hogging 10 W or more for themselves when asked to supply the tiny amounts of standby power required to keep your TV's remote control electronics active or to blink the "12:00" on your DVD player.
Now Power Integrations is out to change this with their new reference design that will let you develop a "green" 1-W standby power supply for your next application. They have offered the components (and reference designs) to build innovative "green" power supplies for several years, but their new evaluation kit accelerates your design process by giving you a "live" prototype to work with from the get-go.
From the looks of the development kit, you won't have to be an analog genius or a switching supply guru to quickly spec out and test a power supply that can cut your BOM and take a bite out of Global warming at the same time. The other nice thing is that their design makes it easy to include advanced features such as soft start (to protect delicate ICs from surges), frequency jittering for low EMI, a wide maximum duty cycle, and hysteretic thermal shutdown. Getting rid of the bulky, expensive heat sink found in many conventional supplies may also help you make your product more competitive.
The bottom line is that for 45 bucks and a day or two of time, you can be well on the way to putting a globally-compliant power supply into your next design. Power Integrations is to be congratulated on producing a product that should put green back into your bottom line as well as the planet.
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