PowerSource

Power supply integration at the chip level is facing some of the same problems that RF system-on-chip designers have been facing for a while now: You can shrink all the control logic down until it can dance on the head of the pin, but the passive components remain large, sensitive to heat, and generally resist integration. But as power supply switching frequencies creep up into the 10 MHz or even 100 MHz range and the passive components correspondingly shrink, integration of an entire power supply onto a single chip becomes possible.

The International Workshop on Power Supply On Chip, being held September 22nd - 24th, 2008, in Cork, Ireland, will be addressing issues such as:

-- control systems
-- power supply in package vs power supply on chip
-- the implications of converter topologies for powerSOC
-- packaging / functional integration
-- capacitor and magnetics materials

…among others. This is a great topic, and it will be interesting to see who the speakers and participating companies are.