CONTENTS

Viewpoint

Motivation and Inspiration . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

News . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6-11

Blue Product of the Month

Future AC Variable Speed Drive Design . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Guest Editorial

By Aubrey Dunford, Europartners . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16

Market

Darnell’s Report

By Linnea Brush, Senior Analyst, Darnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18-19

Cover Story

1mW Isolated DC/DC Converter

By Milan Marjanovic & Matthias Ulmann, Texas Instruments . . 20-22

Thermal Management

Keep Cool

By Rainer Selisko, Mersen Germany and Austria . . . . . . . . . . . 24-25

of Fast High-Voltage Diodes

By Chernikov A. A., Gubarev V. N., Stavtsev A. V.,

Surma A. M., Vetrov I. Y., Proton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30-37

IGBTs

IGBTs in Reverse Gear

By Stefan Schuler, Development Engineer

and André Müller, BA student, SEMIKRON . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38-40

Alternative Energy

Energy Harvesting Systems Power the Powerless

By Bakul Damle and Moe Rubenzahl,

New Products . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48-56

Toshiba’s innovative family of DTMOS power MOSFETs are now available not only with a maximum

Vdss rating of 600V but also with 650V. The range makes your solutions more efficient, thanks to

faster switching speed, linked with optimized RDS(on) x Q(g) performance.

Our compact smart isolation TO220SIS package combined with the copper connector technology, have

made the Toshiba DTMOS MOSFETs hard to resist. And, if you need higher power, our TO-3P(N) package

are available too.

ago, IDT has now completed the first sys-

tem-ready prototypes of its coolRAC compo-

nents. These include a 480VAC 3-phase

input/50VAC output PSU Silverbox, 300W

50VAC input/5VDC output Synchronous

Rectifier, and a 5VDC input/1VDC output

Voltage Regulator Module (VRM). A 3.6kW

Server Power Demonstration System shows

the functionality of the power conversion

components in a server-like application.

sists of a 20U 19” standard rack, two PSU

Silverboxes, and six power blades (five with

5V loads and one with VRMs and 1V loads).

The backplane was designed to show that a

low cost two-layer, two ounce copper PCB

backplane was sufficient to supply the

required power at high efficiency for this

demonstration. A LabVIEW

interface was used to moni-

tor power at critical points in

load conversion, the core

voltage conversion is done

by a VR12.x Intel standard or

equivalent, 6-phase PWM

Buck controller. It is widely

known that if the input volt-

age to the controller is reduced from 12V to

5V a significant boost in efficiency can be

realised. The efficiency boost achieved ver-

sus the typical 12VDC to 1.0VDC conversion

achieved using a Voltage Regulator Down

(VRD) implementation if the board area and

the design expertise are available. The

coolRAC demonstration system utilises six

VRMs on one of the power blades in order

to show the overall system efficiency, to the

1VDC output of the VRM. The efficiency of

all six VRMs running in parallel on this blade

is over 95%

bus. The SR converts the 50VAC 100KHz

backplane voltage to 5VDC at 98% efficien-

cy. The SR configuration is centre tap with

secondary side control using a 10:1:1 trans-

former ratio.

Backplane

Backplane losses are very low using a

50VAC 100kHz AC distribution voltage - typi-

cally less than 1%. Also, 50VAC is overall

also provided very low losses on the back-

nation of the two can be implemented.

Power Supply Unit/Silver box

The Front-end PSU Silver box was designed

for 3.6kW maximum output power. This

power level provides a building block for sat-

COMMUNICATION POWER