USB technology has evolved – from a data interface capable of supplying limited power to a primary power source with an interactive data interface. Today, many devices charge or get their power from USB ports contained in laptops, cars, aircrafts or even wall sockets.

Because of its compact size and ability to both deliver power and transfer data, USB Power Delivery (PD) has…

The buck-boost charger has become increasingly popular in recent years given its ability to charge a battery from nearly any input source, regardless of whether the input voltage is higher or lower than the battery voltage.

One critical benefit of the widespread adoption of USB Type-C is a realistic path to a universal adapter and corresponding e-waste reduction. Although…

Today’s “always-on” consumer wants to charge their portable electronics wherever they are. For example, it’s common to see travelers charging their cellphones, laptops and headphones while waiting to board a flight or hop on a train. But when there are different charging methods for each device, these consumers must carry different adapters, and it can become quite a hassle…

Beauty and personal care products have traditionally been designed with a traditional AC power supply. Therefore, every time consumers use such products, they need to be close to the wall, and any movement and power is restrained by the length of the electrical cord. As modern electronics have evolved, consumers now expect to be able to use personal care products such as a shavers…

Power metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) use a thin oxide to isolate the gate electrode from the active area of the transistor. Much like the MOSFET structures used in the fabrication of microprocessors, a power MOSFET gate oxide is just as susceptible to damage from electrostatic discharge (ESD) as its tinier counterparts. ESD may cause catastrophic failure (such as gate-oxide breakdown) or…

Dan Tooth co-authored this technical article

Your new design needs to fit twice as much into half the space and cost nothing – sound familiar? You selected the smallest point-of-load regulator and generated the tightest layout you could with the most cost-effective passive components. So far so good. But then you look at the output ripple on your critical rails and it’s not what you expected. What’s going on?…

For low-power isolated designs that require an extended product life cycle, such as gate-driver bias for automotive traction inverters, or 4- to 20-mA loop sensors in field transmitters for factory automation applications, many designers choose to leverage the reliability and simplicity of a primary-side regulated (PSR) multioutput flyback converter. Two key attributes of…

Anyone designing electronic products is forced to make a trade-off between adding modern features and trying to fit everything into the available space. As electronic designs advance, every iteration of new technology demands more creativity. Adding new, complex features while increasing power density and decreasing the size of the power supply becomes a key priority. While this problem spans almost every application…

The current flowing to or from a battery pack is measured and used for several different purposes. For example, if a removable battery pack from a power tool has an accidental short, huge currents may flow and lead to an unsafe situation. Large currents may similarly flow if an appliance with an embedded battery (such as a vacuum cleaner) malfunctions internally, possibly…

Typically, scalable characteristics are something that Spider-Man looks for in a building. And although power-supply design may not seem like your typical superhero activity, the scalability of your design is often just as important as meeting the requirements of the application you’re designing for. What better way to enable this versatility than to use a scalable device family?

A scalable device family is a set…

To meet evolving energy regulations that require lower standby power and higher efficiency, engineers are designing power supplies that use light-load modes such as burst-mode operation. Although light-load modes help minimize standby power, they introduce a new challenge: the potential for the power-supply magnetics to emit high-pitch ringing. If…

Power over Ethernet (PoE) is a long-established – and well-adopted – power delivery technology that injects power over 100 m of standard CAT 5 Ethernet cable. This technology radically simplified installation for end equipment such as Internet Protocol (IP) phones, wireless access points for Wi-Fi® connections and IP cameras, and provides features such as power redundancy and smooth power-source transitions (also called…

As reviewed in my earlier article, accurate monitoring of battery voltage, current and temperature is necessary to ensure the safe operation of battery-powered systems such as vacuum cleaners, power tools and e-bikes. In this article, I will focus on voltage monitoring of lithium-based batteries.

A key requirement of safety standards for lithium-based battery systems is that…

Electromagnetic noise is any type of unwanted electromagnetic energy that contains sufficient intensity to distort a signal. When designing high-performance data-acquisition applications or any system with particularly sensitive signal paths, noise is therefore the opponent to beat.

On the power-supply side, high-efficiency DC/DC converters can be significant sources of noise due…

Automotive camera module designers have to balance reducing time to market while creating ever-smaller camera module designs that are scalable and reusable for various types of image serializers and sensors. In this article, I will address several key design challenges for automotive camera module designs, including design simplification and platform scalability.

Simplify design…

This year marks the 35th anniversary of the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC). It’s a perfect reason to take a trip down memory lane when it comes to power-supply design for system-on-chip (SoC) applications, such as communication base stations, test and measurement equipment or data centers.

While designing thermally optimized power supplies has never been an easy…

Single-board computers for industrial applications once functioned only as a simple logic controller for handling a human machine interface (HMI), providing various control functions and network communication. Today, single-board computers act as the brain of complex systems used in industrial robotics, machine vision and factory automation.

To deliver the processing required, current-generation single-board computers…

From exploding demo boards to the first-ever session on gate drivers, APEC has evolved over the last 35 years from a small conference for power design enthusiasts to the world’s largest gathering of leading power experts and power design innovators. Read the memories of our APEC veterans to get a glimpse of what APEC was like 35 years ago, and how the show, TI and the power industry…

As we reviewed in my article, Next-generation battery monitors: how to improve battery safety while improving accuracy and extending runtime, accurate monitoring of battery voltage, current and temperature can help ensure safe operation of systems for popular consumer products, including vacuum cleaners, power tools and e-bikes. In this article, we will take a deeper look…

As I discussed in the first installment of this series, one option to control output voltage (V_OUT) for USB Type-C Power Delivery (PD) and wireless charging applications is to use switching resistors. This article will explain a different approach that requires fewer components and signal lines called modulated voltage programming.

Modulated voltage programming

You may recall from part 1 that switching resistors require…

Power architecture designs for space applications have historically lagged behind the commercial world due to the complexity of designing radiation-hardened integrated circuits (ICs). Today, the situation is changing rapidly. Developments in 5G technology are fueling the need for more bandwidth and global Internet coverage, pushing many countries to launch higher…

While you may already have a good idea of what isolation is, perhaps you have questions about the various types. In this technical article, I’ll define the four major types of isolation and explain how engineers can benefit from TI’s new fully integrated transformer technology, which delivers several advantages compared to other reinforced isolation solutions.

Simply…

For applications using USB Type-C Power Delivery (PD) and wireless charging, the output voltage (V_OUT) from the charger can fluctuate higher or lower than the input voltage. Four-switch buck-boost regulators are popular in these applications because adjusting their feedback signal can dynamically change the V_OUT.

A buck-boost regulator’s output voltage can be adjusted either…

As the factory automation and control equipment market evolves, shipments of equipment with sensors such as field transmitters, machine vision and position sensors are increasing. As a result, the demand for feature-rich power integrated circuits (ICs) that could power these devices is also growing.

Figure 1 shows a block diagram of a temperature transmitter. The nonisolated power…

For aspiring electrical engineering students trying to decide what to specialize in, I strongly encourage considering power electronics. Every new electrical or electronic product needs a power supply – talk about job security! Despite what you might think, the field is full of challenging work and opportunity for innovation, driven by the quest for smaller devices and higher efficiency.

It may not be as sexy as…