Digital power is no longer a promise, but a commercial fact with many available products. The reasons for the market irruption are competitive cost compared to analog solutions and additional functionality at almost no extra cost. Additionally, international policies for energy saving, like Energy Star or European Codes of Conduct, can be more easily met using digital power. This may become a driving force for digital power adoption.

Digital power refers not only to the digital implementation of the control loop of a power converter, but also to the power management in its broader sense, including monitoring and fault detection, programming of the loop filter and control algorithm, tracking of output voltages, sequencing of different voltage rails, margining of power converters or remote maintenance.

Two main approaches can be distinguished: Fully digital controlled converters including closed loop control (driven by ICs or Microcontrollers) and digital managed analog or semi-digital contolled converters (complete modules which use digital techniques for control and/or power management). Attention needs also to be paid to the communication bus. Among the available alternatives, PMBus is becoming most popular, already adopted by the main players.

An increasing market transition from analog to digital power is foreseen in the near future, and this seminar brings some insight in the key digital control techniques.

Prof. José A. Cobos (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) will chair the seminar together with Dr. Ulrich Kirchenberger (STMicroelectronics) and Thomas Harder (ECPE).

All presentations and discussions will be in English.