EDN's Best of Power: Letter from the editor

Power electronics continues to be a topic of vital interest to EDN readers, who include the most influential members of the power-design industry, so it's helpful to use EDN-readership patterns to draw some conclusions about trends in technology, products, and overall reader interest within the power-systems market. Just as popular-culture trend-watchers keep tabs on the hottest search terms on Google and Yahoo, it's also valuable to see what's of interest to power-system professionals.

EDN's "Best of Power" provides an overview of some of the topics that you, the power professionals, have ranked the best. We've broken down our findings into four basic categories: Features, Design Ideas, Community/Blog Posts, and Products, which we've further divided into subcategories. We've also provided a brief summary of trends, as well as pointers to more in-depth coverage that has appeared on the topic in EDN and EDN.com.

In addition, we've included one of the all-time-favorite power Design Ideas, "Circuit makes simple high-voltage inverter," and a sidebar from a power-related article, "PCB [printed-circuit-board]-layout configurations affect ground bounce." These tutorials continue to gain readers' interest because of their timely subjects: The simple inverter is relevant to today's interest in sustainable solar-energy sources, which often require inverters, and the effects of ground bounce are basic to understanding power-supply-design constraints.

We've pulled these numbers from EDN's Website traffic reports from January—December 2007; hence, their credibility. EDN boasts more than a million page views and 100,000 unique visitors a month. More than half of those visitors say that concern about power is a big part of their jobs, and they come to EDN because its content helps them quickly solve their problems.