News and New Products

TI addresses power-supply knowledge gap with purchase
of reference-design company

By Margery Conner, Technical Editor -- EDN, 5/22/2008

The need to incorporate sophisticated power supplies into electronic systems has in recent years challenged designers. Just five years ago, digital-electronics-application designers could concentrate on their digital-hardware specialty along with the software to run it, and that focus took care of 99% of the design challenges for a new electronics product—be it a consumer product, a portable device, a home appliance, or even a laptop or desktop computer. A cheap, low-efficiency external adapter or perhaps similarly inefficient internal linear-power supply handled power. Energy was cheap, and neither consumers nor government regulators cared about wasted energy.

Those days are gone. The Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 mandates a federal standard for external power supplies, and this year, the US Department of Energy’s Energy Star label, a voluntary certification, established minimum power efficiency as well as power-factor compliance for most internal and external power supplies.

Design teams must now develop design expertise in arcane specialties of power-supply efficiency and power-factor correction. Analog IC vendors, such as Maxim, Power Integrations, and Linear Technology, have introduced many ICs that address just these problems, but designers must select these ICs to match the application and match them with magnetics, heat sinks, EMI (electromagnetic-interference) filters, and on and on. Using them is not a cookbook solution.

Texas Instruments is also addressing these problems. With its recent purchase of Commergy Technologies, a 13-person Irish power-supply-reference-design company, TI is recognizing that its value added in the power-supply market must go beyond cool, new power-management ICs and address the knowledge gap in the electronics-design world. Commergy’s expertise in creating these reference designs includes planar magnetics, power-factor correction, power-topology design, thermal management, and EMC (electromagnetic-compatibility) design. In short, TI has purchased an integrated outsourcing path for its customers’ power-subsystem designs.