First off though, I must let you know about a great new service we have, based on your feedback, to help keep you informed in real-time and to give you the chance to participate. It's our newly-launched community section on our website. Check it out, there's a lot more coming too. Just go to our homepage and click on the community tab on the right, sign up and start getting exclusive content. Going back over the years I remember the focus groups and heated engineering discussions I witnessed, between the analog engineering gurus and the ‘new' digital power proponents who were then anxious to utilize their digital skills to do what analog had always done. Visionaries were looking forward to the time when the full advantages of digital power could be harnessed in a way that would not only speed up design cycles such as the control loop compensation, but also be applied more widely at a system level. Meeting power design specs these days can necessitate the use of complex, high density ICs to provide the differentiated features in products now demanded by the end market. Increasingly, these products can require multiple rails with a corresponding increase in the complexity of system power management. The use of digital power to manage these supplies is becoming increasingly important. Companies like Zilker Labs, now part of the dynamic Intersil Corporation and expertly steered by its CEO, Dave Bell, have made great strides forward in digital power to show that it is indeed a very useful technology that has successfully been made ‘designer friendly' by the development of user friendly GUIs and design tools that take away the fear-factor of entering into a digital power design. The explosive growth projected for power supplies with digital control and management will increase demand for SiC diodes, DSPs and MPUs according to a report from IMS Research. However, in the long term, this will be at the expense of PFC controller ICs, and analog controllers and regulators. Although supplies with digital control and management are predicted to account for less than 10% of the total merchant market for power supplies in 2015, their components will be worth almost $1 billion. There will be a strong growth in demand for all component types. However, digital controllers/converters are predicted to replace their analog counterparts; and with the use of a DSP or MPU, some functions such as PFC will be performed without a dedicated IC. This will thus impair the demand for some component types. I hope you enjoy our website with it's ongoing improvements, all based on your valuable feedback. Please keep it coming in. It really helps. All the best, Cliff Editorial Director & Editor-in-Chief Power Systems Design Cliff.Keys@powersystemsdesign.com
