Darnell power forum in Chicago

The Darnell Group has rebranded the Darnell Digital Power Forum as Darnell’s Power Forum. It is Sept 13-15, 2010 at Doubletree Hotel Chicago - Oak Brook. Cost of $947 gets you

• 3-Day Conference Admission
• Welcome Reception, Hosted Lunch, Coffee Breaks
• 2-Day Admission to the Exhibits
• Panel Discussions, Plenary Session and Networking
• Conference notebook and an electronic version of the conference proceedings

The forum has been expanded to include GaN (gallium nitride), smart grid,  energy harvesting, as well as digital power.  It was at the DPF two years ago when I sat at a table with two famous power gurus who predicted that Darnell would take “Digital” out of the forum name. It seems that despite all the hype surrounding digital power, customers have not embraced it as widely as hoped. This observation, along with the fact all my FAE (filed application engineer) buddies tell me there was not much demand for it, along with my pals at Cisco saying that they were not doing wholesale adoption of digital power, along with the fact that several companies such as Linear Tech and National were not selling parts that had digital loops, was the inspiration for my recent article Digital Power, Beyond the Hype. Now, be aware that digital control and monitoring of power has always been popular. Linear Tech makes an I2C part that can control and margin 8 analog power chips. Maxim has something similar. Summit Microsystems wraps digital control and communication around an analog core to get handheld power chips that only use 100uA of quiescent current. But this is not the same thing as using a digital PWM control loop inside the chip.

So digital power, even using a digital PWM (pulse width modulation) loop, is catching on, but only where it makes sense. Some of the things that marketers are finding:

• They shouldn’t call analog power engineers stupid dinosaurs.
• Companies will not buy digital power just because digital is in the name.
• Companies will not pay more for digital power chips.
• Companies really don’t want non-linear loop compensation and other snazzy things.
• Power engineers are not too enthusiastic about learning Z-domain equations and sampled-data math.
• Power engineers want to be able to connect a vector network analyzer to the circuit and have it work.

Now this is not to say digital PWM loops are not useful– in some places. I don’t know of any analog chips that can do cycle-by-cycle loop response tuning or even a one-time auto-tune on power up. Intersil’s Zilker division has had auto-tuning for years and engineers love that feature. It is like getting a vector network analyzer in every chip you buy. Zilker can also do cycle-by-cycle tuning in their latest chips. In any event, be sure to check out the Darnell’s Power Forum. That is where I picked up the real skinny on digital power and now you can learn about digital power as well as a host of other things. Darnell gets great speakers and technologies for their conferences and now that they have widened the subject matter, it will be even better.