Page 11 - Power Electronics News - December 2020

SMART ENERGY Smart Energy

In his 1998 book ‘Power electronics design hand- Although in 2020 Digital Power is an established

book low-power components and application’, part of the power engineer’s toolbox, we should
Nihal Kulartna considered that the term ‘Smart remember that making power supplies smarter
Power’ was more relevant when related to in- has been a long quest and we should recognize
creasing functionality levels at chip level, re- the merits of the pioneers who sewed the seeds
ducing the number of surrounding components of ‘Digital Power’ including Trey Burns, N.R. Miller
required by the power controller, simplifying de- and Chris Henze.
sign and reducing the amount of space required
on customers’ boards. Among the additional Regarding those inventors I would like to mention
functions added to a single chip, at that time we an interesting event that took place when the

could name drive circuitry, thermal protection, power industry was starting to slowly consid-
over and under voltage protection, current limit- er the migration from linear-power to switching
ing, and diagnostics. power using the SG1524 IC. Trey Burns researched
and explored the use of the State-Trajectory
In the late nineties many Smart Power controllers Control Law in step-up DC/DC converters and he
were developed to meet the demanding environ- compared two methods of realization, one em-
mental and cost constraints of the automotive ploying a digital processor and the other using

and consumer electronics industries requiring analogue computational circuits. The results of
highly integrated levels of functionality to reduce this research were presented at various confer-
space and cost. ences but PESC 1977 is considered as the origin
of a wave of research into digital methods to
Although within the semiconductors industry the drive, monitor and control DC/DC converters and
definition of Smart Power may have been obvi- power supplies.
ous, discussions and debates were raging with- It is now anecdotal but nonetheless interesting
in the power community about ‘Smart Power’
Making smart power a especially when a new technology, the so-called to note that an experimental product built by

‘Digital Power’, was also the subject of many
Trey Burs was a boost converter operating at a
reality! discussions. Diplomatically, Nihal Kulartna con- switching frequency of 100Hz. That now sounds
slow, but it had to be so because it took up to
cluded that the term ‘Smart Power’ was used for
institutional rather than technical reasons, and 450μsec to execute the digital program per sam-
By Patrick Le Fèvre, PRBX, Chief Marketing and Communication Officer that remains very much the case. ple. The digital controller was a PDP 11/45 mi-
ni-computer, and the boost converter was built
As in many other definitions, ‘Smart Power’ has THE ORIGIN OF SMART POWER using a 10mH cut-C core inductor (very big and

become a marketing buzz phrase and it’s some- In the case of the PWM pioneers, ‘Smart Power’ WHEN DIGITAL MAKES POWER heavy) and approximately 13,000μF of capaci-
times hard to understand what the ‘smart’ part was born in 1976 when Silicon General launched SUPPLIES SMARTER! tance. The research team pushed the circuitry up
means. Or if we put it another way, - what the the famous Pulse Width Modulator SG1524 chip. For the 21st century power electronics designers, to the computer on a cart.
benefits are for the end user. It may be equally But for many of us it was in the mid-nineties ‘Smart Power’ started with the implementation
difficult to identify when Smart Power became when the semiconductor industry pushed sili- of digital power, bringing in a new dimension in Following PESC 1977, power engineers made lots
trendy, but today, from a power controller IC to con boundaries by adding more functionalities to the way that a power supply can be controlled to of progress researching how to digitalize power
a fully automated factory, Smart Power is every- power control integrated circuits. optimize overall performance by using microcon- control, and the years 1984 and 1985 represent
where and with the growing Industry 4.0 its posi- trollers and software in a ‘smart’ way. the second cornerstone in the evolution of digital
tion as a predominant technology is assured. power technology.

10 DECEMBER 2020 | www.powerelectronicsnews.com DECEMBER 2020 | www.powerelectronicsnews.com 11