Analog and power guru Bob Pease corresponds with readers about the latest proposals for electric cars in this exclusive online edition of his popular mailbag.

By 2010, a booming demand for solar energy will increase worldwide investments in the production of Photovoltaic (PV) cells to the same level as those for semiconductor manufacturing, according to iSuppli. The market research group predicts global production of PV cells will rise to as much as 12 GW by 2010, up from 3.5 GW in 2007.

Calling it a milestone towards fabricating low-cost GaN power devices for high-efficiency/high-power systems beyond the limits of silicon, IMEC and Aixtron have grown high-quality, uniform AlGaN/GaN heterostructures on 200-mm wafers. This is the first time crack-free AlGaN/GaN structures have been deposited onto 200-mm Si(111) wafers, according to the companies.

The IEEE has named István Nagy recipient of the organization’s 2008 William Newell Award for his work in developing four generations of excitation systems for large electric power plants. Nagy is a research professor at the Budapest University of Technology in Hungary.

A new standard from the Telecommunications Industry Association defines a data modem that operates on electrical wiring (ac power lines) on users’ premises. The document, TIA-1113, “Medium-Speed (up to 14-Mbit/s) Power Line Communications (PLC) Modems Using Windowed OFDM,” is the first global multi-megabit, broadcast class, PLC standard approved by ANSI, according to the association.

In recent years, the news of individual battery incidents such as cell-phone and laptop fires has been eclipsed by factory fires and large recalls of lithium-ion (Liion) cells. Several large, well-known Li-ion cell suppliers have been affected. The most notable event was the recall of Sony batteries in 2005. Panasonic and, more recently, LG Chemical have had fires affecting their Li-ion manufacturing volume as well. While these factors present challenges for...

At the recent International Electronics Forum (IEF) in Dubai, UAE, I attended two days of presentations about the semiconductor industry. The speakers were from all parts of the world and offered unique perspectives. But the talk I found most interesting was given by Mark Pinto, CTO and senior vice president at Applied Materials, as his presentation tackled “Energy Conversion: Photovoltaics.” Photovoltaics (PV) have been making great strides in the last...

Last June at Darnell’s Nanopower Forum, Face International demonstrated prototypes of its Lightning remote switching technology for home and business wiring (see “Zombies And Energy Harvesting” at www.electronicdesign.com, ED Online 15788). At that conference, Lightning was essentially a charge stored in clouds of hope. By...

Voltages are bussed around all the time, but the applications and voltage levels are many and diverse. One of the high-voltage apps du jour, for example, is the data center. Everybody knows about the phenomenal rise of the Internet over the last few years, but few think much about how all of the generated data gets stored and distributed. To enable this capability, the emergence and growth of datacenters or server farms—and the power they increasingly...

Recently, a guy asked me how to draw a constant 1.00 mA from a node of a circuit. Of course, he did not tell me what volts, ohms, or frequency. But, he admitted, he basically did not know how to design a current source. So I’m sorry to waste the time of all you guys who do know how to design a current-source. But maybe this lecture can help and save you some time so you don’t have to teach all the young kids. If you need a current source, and you don’t know ...

High-brightness LEDs (HBLEDs) are making inroads into more traditional lighting applications that include a dc distribution system (for example, 24-V MR-16 track lights). HBLEDs are more efficient, and they have a potentially longer lifespan than do halogen or xenon lamps. Because hysteretic controllers are inexpensive, simplify lighting designs, and require no compensation networks, they’re well-suited for driving HBLEDs....

The converter described below, based on a silicon bipolarjunction transistor (BJT), can operate at as low as 250 mV, which is probably a record for a converter not based on a JFET or germanium transistor. How is this possible? The VBE threshold is not clear-cut, depending on current density and other factors. But 250 mV is way below the lowest accepted values. There has to be a trick and there is, sort of. The big difficulty is in the starting....

Designers of portable electronics such as cell phones, portable media players, and GPS devices are always pushing to squeeze every ounce of battery life out of the application. In particular, in the realm of power conversion, engineers aspire to ensure that every coulomb that leaves the battery finds its way to a point-of-load (POL) without being lost or dissipated as heat. The solution is not always straightforward, though, because as in...

Ballast-control ICs from International Rectifier and other similar half-bridge gate drivers feature an undervoltage lockout (UVLO) on the high-side output. This function protects the driven MOSFETs or insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) in the event that VB drops to potentially dangerous low levels. When designing an electronic ballast for operation off a 12-V dc (10.5 V to 13.6 V) battery, however, the UVLO creates a challenge ...

The well-known Kirchhoff’s current law is often used in linear circuit analysis. It’s also called Kirchhoff ’s first law, Kirchhoff ’s point rule, Kirchhoff ’s junction rule, and Kirchhoff ’s first rule. The law says that at any point in an electric circuit, the sum of currents flowing toward the point is equal to the sum of currents flowing away from the point. That is, the net current flow into the point is always zero. This article describes a new way of using...