Today's power management technology presents four major development trends

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Today's power management technology presents four major development trends [Copy link]

无线多媒体通信和计算市场的迅猛发展既对电源提出了越来越高的要求，同时也为电源以及电源管理IC市场的发展注入了一股强劲的增长动力。近几年来电源管理IC的市场规模和潜力一直处在急速膨胀之中。据美国风险发展公司(VDC)估计，2004年电源管理IC的销售收入将超过75亿美元，平均年增长速率将超过16%。电信和计算机将是其中增长最显著的两大应用领域。

One of the major goals of power management is to increase battery power time, because this has become the biggest obstacle to the further development of today's wireless communication market and portable consumer electronics. How to make the battery life meet the user's acceptable expectations has become the biggest challenge facing the wireless communication industry. Since battery technology is relatively mature, the power density of lithium-ion batteries is unlikely to increase dramatically in the short term, and new battery technologies such as fuel cells are still several years away from commercial application due to safety issues and lack of standards. Therefore, the industry can only work hard on power management and architecture. In general, current power management technology mainly presents the following four major development trends:

First, improve the battery power conversion efficiency as much as possible. In portable devices such as mobile phones, linear low-dropout (LDO) regulators are traditionally used to convert battery voltage to a predetermined voltage value and provide the power required by the load. However, in recent years, due to the widespread use of deep submicron process manufacturing technology, the operating voltage of digital devices has become quite low, coupled with the demand for lighter and smaller batteries, the use of LDO regulators has been decreasing, because the power conversion efficiency of such devices is quite low, reportedly only 36% on average. The current trend is to use switching regulators, whose power conversion efficiency can be as high as 90% or more.

Second, maximize the power utilization efficiency of load devices. Traditionally, power management IC suppliers have always focused on managing power delivery, that is, how to allocate different powers to different load devices. But now they find that this is not enough. The power consumption of load devices is also a management topic with great potential. For example, load devices do not have to be kept in full-speed operation under different workloads, or load devices do not have to supply the same power in standby and working states. As long as they are well managed, this can also become an important factor in extending the battery life. National Semiconductor's adaptive voltage scaling (AVS) technology and TI's dynamic voltage and frequency scaling (DVFS) technology are solutions proposed to meet this power management challenge.

Third, in high-end telecommunications and network equipment, distributed power architecture (DPA) has become the mainstream application mode. Usually the backplane bus voltage is 24V (common in wireless communication equipment such as BTS, BSC) or 48V. Each plug-in board uses one or more brick-type power modules to convert the bus voltage to the system voltage within the board, and uses a non-isolated load point converter (POL) to obtain a high-power low-voltage power supply. The advantage is that this can speed up system design, reduce design risks, increase PCB wiring density, and also reduce costs (because the number of expensive isolated brick modules used is reduced).

In addition to telecommunications and network equipment, more and more other applications are beginning to adopt distributed power system architectures, such as storage devices. Therefore, in recent years, the POL market has developed faster than the isolated DC/DC power module market, and the market capacity is also rising rapidly.

Fourth, modular, semi-modular and discrete solutions have their own advantages and disadvantages. For manufacturers, high-power DC/DC power modular solutions provide the easiest implementation solution to eliminate their pressure to quickly go to market, but for some high-end system applications, this is a solution they are not willing to adopt, because although DC/DC power module suppliers have launched quarter-brick packaging products, this may still be too large (that is, occupying too much PCB board area), or simply cannot meet the space requirements allocated to the power supply. Although the discrete solution is relatively space-saving, this method also has its disadvantages that cannot be ignored, that is, the design time is too long and the resources required are too many. Therefore, compared with the above two solutions, the ideal solution should use a smaller PCB board space and be quite easy to implement. The iPOWIR technology proposed by IR is such a more compromised semi-modular method. Compared with modular and discrete solutions, it can save 50% and 40% of PCB area respectively.