Jeff Nilles Does APEC - Wednesday

I expected something big to happen in the Wide band-gap semiconductor RAP session on Tuesday afternoon.  Attendees packed the place even though it was in the biggest room in the conference other than the Plenary.  By the time I arrived, they had run out of beer so the audience was relatively quiet. Maybe the committee should have set a few more beers out on the panel table just to keep the audience a bit more argumentative. Alex Lido of Efficient Power Conversion Corp. threw out a bone to draw the rest of the panel in but they simply ignored it.  The RAP session fizzled out after that.

The exhibition hall has been open since Monday for about four hours a day. This is one of the few conferences that does not have overlapping hours between the exhibition and technical sessions. As a result, the exhibition hall is full of people most of the time.  But the real work with customers is behind the scenes.

During the Wednesday morning technical session on High Performance Devices in Circuits, Virginia Tech's grad, Yin Wang, showed a clever new method of using an LM5113 gate driver as a 5V floating power supply for another gate driver. Now that it's public, feel free to use it (see diagram from Dr. Khai Ngo and his student below). I do not believe this was the original purpose of the driver, but you do not need gate drive transformers with this method or even another isolated 5V power supply to drive the gates.

To read more of my blog, "Jeff does APEC", visit TI's Power House blog.