Popular power supply design

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Popular power supply design [Copy link]

by Russ Rathweg

We recently visited customers in Asia and learned that every company is very focused on efficiency. A company in Beijing told us that the new EuP directives now have the " force of law " to ensure compliance . Light load efficiency is a key part of these standards.

TI has mastered the art of achieving high efficiency in power supply designs from 10% load to 100% load. The challenge is to design components that meet the requirements from 0 to 10% . One way to solve this problem is to do it similarly to the way a sports utility vehicle (SUV) works, when the engine does not need 8 cylinders to work, it shuts down 4 to achieve higher efficiency. This is called skip mode or pulse skipping in switching power supply circuits, and we use this technology in many of our new DC-DC products. Another way to help achieve light load efficiency is to slightly reduce the voltage in steps related to the amount of processing required at a particular time. This technique, called voltage regulation, must be coordinated between the power supply and the processor. Both functional blocks (processor and power supply) must adopt this approach in the same way for it to be effective. Early coordination between the two designers can help achieve this goal.

This approach applies to a wide range of consumer products, not just STBs . Wall adapters are a very interesting product, and I saw somewhere that if all wall adapters were plugged directly into the AC mains with high light load efficiency in the next few years, China could eliminate a lot of power plants. If they eliminated 5 power plants, imagine how much they would save in engineering costs, energy costs, and carbon emissions. This is the importance of regulators in the long run.