Ally Winning, European Editor, PSD
Welcome to the January edition of Power Systems Design Europe. All of us here at the magazine would like to take this opportunity to wish you a very healthy and wealthy 2025! It looks to be an exciting time for the industry, and we will be here to bring you updates on all of the technology advances.
One vertical market where innovation shows no sign of slowing down is the automotive industry. It is not just the traction and charging parts of the vehicle that pose a challenge for the power industry, the whole architecture of vehicles is going through a change at the moment as we move from a distributed architecture to a zonal one. Instead of having hundreds of ECUs spread around the vehicles, needing power and the ability to communicate with each other, a single high power computer will provide the centralized control for the vehicle and a handful of more powerful ECUs will take care of the different zones in the vehicle. This change will reduce the amount of wiring required and the cost of the electronics in the vehicle. However, it also will have the downside of meaning that high performance CPUs, GPUs and ASICs will be much more prevalent in vehicle designs and powering them will be far more complex.
Our Special Report on EVs, Hybrids, and Charging Infrastructure this month will investigate some of these challenges. The first article in the Special Report comes from Analog Devices and it looks at the problems of supplying energy to these power hungry chips. Voltage regulators will have to deal with high currents, demanding loads and large and fast transients, while maintaining extremely high levels of efficiency. The article shows how coupled inductors can support fast slew rates, while minimizing current ripple.
The second article in the Special Report was contributed by Rutronik and it describes how DFN packages can be incorporated into automotive designs. These packages are designed for harsh environments, offer higher power density, smaller package sizes and better signal integrity in a smaller form factor, making them ideal for the automotive industry. However, they can be tricky to integrate into the design, especially during the PCB soldering stage. The company’s Thomas Bolz describes the steps that can be taken to ensure that the DFN packaged component is secure on the board and delivers its benefits to the full.
The final article in this month’s Special Report was submitted by Toshiba and is something a little different. As vehicles move to zonal architecture changes, it is not just the power requirements that change - better communications technology is also required to carry the data that is needed for processing and control. The article describes how the Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN) standard is an ideal medium to deliver that time critical information.
As well as the Special Report, this month’s issue will also contain the latest news and views from the industry, as well as general power articles in our Tech Focus sections. I hope you enjoy.
Best Regards,
Ally Winning
European Editor, PSD
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