Unlock innovation with power management expertise

Every electronic device has something in common: the need for power.

Designing power management solutions correctly from the beginning pays major dividends later, both in longevity and user satisfaction.

Yet, prioritizing the cost, size and efficiency of power management solutions without compromising performance is a delicate balancing act that requires crucial choices upfront.

In this article, we discuss the major considerations for powering your design to maximize return, design holistically beyond the power supply and deliver the best possible cost-size-efficiency balance.

What is power management, really?

Power management is really an exercise in understanding the tradeoffs needed to unlock innovation. In short, top-notch power management extends battery life, makes devices run efficiently and enables applications to run smarter.

Designers use power management to control the amount of electrical power consumed by an underlying device while maximizing performance. It’s used to manage and control power for multiple devices within a design. It also enables switching of devices to various power modes (on, off, standby), each with power usage characteristics related to device performance.

Energy costs and the push to greener energy help drive the market for power management solutions today.

Market Research Future (MRFR) projects the global power management IC market will reach US$46.15 billion by 2025, registering a compound annual growth rate of 9.5% from 2019 to 2025.

Advances in power management enable significant growth in applications within various sectors like automotive, consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications.

Maximizing return

Your approach to power design affects everything from cost to device longevity and user satisfaction. Experienced partners can help achieve positive outcomes in those areas for the long haul.

Power management systems also help ensure the safe, reliable, efficient and compliant operation of electrical distribution systems, including connected assets.

They help you:

• Avoid electrical fires and prevent shock
• Recover from outages quickly and safely
• Improve uptime
• Reduce energy costs
• Optimize maintenance and device longevity
• Simplify compliance

Design beyond the power supply with a comprehensive system approach

The ever-present pressure to pack more power into shrinking footprints requires continual innovation. Figuring out how all the technologies fit to create the needed power supply and management solution takes expertise you may not have and must develop.

How do you reduce the size of passive components? One simple solution is to increase the switching frequency. The passive components in switching converters store and release energy every switching cycle. Higher switching frequencies require less energy storage for each of those cycles.

However, solving the puzzle requires designers who understand that simply increasing switching frequency isn’t enough. Power switches, gate drivers, mode-setting resistors, feedback network components, electromagnetic interference (EMI) filters, current-sensing components, interfacing circuits, heat sinks — all of these components take up valuable real estate. Understanding how these elements impact your overall power management solution is what makes innovation possible.

Taking a comprehensive system approach to your design means looking beyond the power supply to minimize EMI, enhance power and signal integrity and make systems safer.

For example, power density improvement is a challenge engineers have studied for years. Most of the work focuses on reducing passive component size. Inductors, capacitors, transformers and heat sinks typically take up the largest portion of the power solution size. The semiconductor switches and control circuitry are considerably smaller and more integrated.

Balancing all these aspects within budget can seem like an insurmountable problem. That’s why partnerships with power management experts can help smaller companies scale more quickly.

Balance cost/size/efficiency

Designers face unyielding pressure to do more with less. Power supplies will continue to shrink in size and that opens new markets. But power density gain is only one piece of the puzzle.

Virtually all devices and applications today incorporate onboard power-saving features to turn elements on, place them on standby or turn them off according to need and efficiency. From handheld devices to large-scale industrial, communications and IoT applications — power management and control solutions are critical.

But they’re also becoming increasingly complex.

Striking the right design balance at the beginning is especially challenging in devices where the eventual use is unknown. For example, no one knew 20 years ago all the things mobile phones would be required to do today. The same may be true for your device.

Making the right choices can improve power density, but it requires a big-picture approach. You need experts who can help you consider all aspects of the application so you can get to market quickly and cost effectively.

The best experts in power electronics spend many years designing power management solutions for industrial, communications, healthcare, transportation and lighting applications. They share reference designs specific to your application and matched to your processor, programmable logic, memory and analog signal chain.

Finding the right experts means you can design your dream while leaving the power puzzle to the power experts.