Power Systems!

March is of course APEC time, so why did I visit the Embedded World show in Nuremberg/Germany in March? The reason is quite simple: I wanted to get an overview of what’s going on in the world beyond power, about the applications as well as the needs of these applications for today and tomorrow. At such a trade show you can see an incredible amount of computing boards, computing solutions and computing systems – extremely small ones up to relatively high-performance but still compact computing systems. However, computing blades for server farms were not covered in Nuremberg at all.

And now I’ll tell you the main reason why I attended Embedded World: I visited some booths that were embedded between the numerous booths showing embedded computing systems; I visited these power-related companies and talked to them about their systems. One of the most fascinating concepts I saw was presented by the Swiss company EM Microelectronic: They showed a speedometer for bicycles, where the sensor (mounted at the fork) does not need a battery anymore to send the speed data to the display unit (mounted at the handlebar). Up to now these sensors needed lithium batteries like 2032 or 2035 (or a cable, which has lots of disadvantages), and following Murphy’s law these batteries were always empty when you were far away from the next shop selling button cell batteries. EM Microelectronic uses its ultra-low power analog semiconductor technology in the context of energy harvesting, which means that the energy of vibration, temperature gradient etc. is used to power an electronic circuit.

Talking about power circuits: For the first time ever, the Austrian company Recom Power now offers some of the deciding ingredients of their secret sauce used to manufacture Recom’s DC/DC converter solutions for sale by presenting e. g. several custom transformer driver ICs to engineers who want to build their own discrete DC/DC power supply.

Something else: Having seen an incredible number of solutions I realized that “analog” standard transformers running at 50/60 Hz were almost invisible while switch-mode power supplies and DC/DC converters were almost everywhere. It is very good that inefficient LDOs are more and more replaced by highly-efficient SMPS and DC/DC solutions.

Bodo’s magazine is delivered by postal service to all places in the world. It is the only magazine that spreads technical information on power electronics globally. We have EETech as a partner serving our clients in North America. If you speak the language, or just want to have a look, don’t miss our Chinese version at bodospowerchina.com. An archive, of every issue of the magazine, is available for free at our website bodospower.com.

My Green Tip of the Month: Try to avoid using disposable batteries whenever it makes sense. Unfortunately, batteries are way too often disposed of improperly which can cause environmental problems even though proper recycling allows us to return the scarce raw materials back into the product cycle.

Kind regards,
Alfred