This year’s “Tops in power” special section focuses on the most popular power news, articles, and blog posts covering power technology for 2008. Power systems continue to be among the top technologies of interest to EDN readers, and, judging by edn.com traffic, the most interesting areas are in alternative energy and its enabling technologies. For that reason, EDN readers jump on all new battery-technology stories. And, in another twist on the lithium-ion-battery angle, one of the most popular blog posts was about the introduction of a lithium-ion supercapacitor.

There’s more to power than energy storage, though, including how to handle the effects of high currents in small packages, which means heat removal. We finish this installment of “Tops in Power” with “Selecting heat sinks for heavily populated boards,” a new article on heat-sink design that includes research results on high- and low-density passive heat sinks that are finding their way into high-brightness-LED-based designs.

We’ve rated these articles based on Web-site-traffic numbers from edn.com, which receives more than 1 million page views and 100,000 unique visitors a month. More than half of those visitors say that understanding power technology is a big part of their job. We’re happy they come to EDN to help solve their power-related problems.