I'll be travelling to Dallas, Texas, to cover the Power Electronics Technology Exhibition and Conference, formerly known as PowerSystems World. If you ever attended that event, you know that it attracted a mixed bag of power companies. In one aisle, you might have seen a company hawking its latest flywheel technology, while an aisle later you may have found a manufacturer of dcdc converter chips. That all has changed, and for good reason.
David Morrison, editor of Power Electronics Technology, decided that the show needed to sharpen its focus and provide more information for design engineers looking for power technologies and components to integrate into consumer, telecom, medical, and other applications.
I'm looking forward to it because David has put together a compelling set of keynotes, seminars, and technical sessions. And there will be a host of companies exhibiting as well.
Sharpen your pencils Professional advancement courses will be held on the Sunday and Monday prior to the opening of the conference. For example, "Universal Methods of Analyzing and Designing Feedback Regulated DC-DC Switching Power Converters" will be a half-day course led by Haachitaba Mweene, a member of the technical staff at National Semiconductor. Mweene will review Black's Feedback Formula and Cramer's Rule for solving systems of equations. He also will present some basic switching dc-dc converters (buck, boost, buck-boost) and highlight their common features.Also, check out "Energy Harvesting Technologies and Applications for Vibration Energy Harvesters," led by Robert O'Handley, Chief Scientist at Ferro Solutions. This seminar will include an overview of energy-harvesting technologies and devices with an emphasis on piezoelectric and electromechanical vibration energy harvesters.
At the podiumRoger Tipley, a senior technologist/engineering strategist at Hewlett-Packard, will present "Opportunities for Energy Efficiency Innovation in the Power Electronics Industry" as the opening day keynote. Tipley also is a board member of the Green Grid (www.thegreengrid.org).
This consortium of IT companies and professionals seeks to lower the overall consumption of power in data centers around the globe. It was chartered to develop meaningful, platformneutral standards, measurement methods, processes, and new technologies to improve the energy-efficient performance of global data centers.
Thomas Valliere,vice president and cofounder of Design Chain Associates, will present the second day's keynote, "Update on China RoHS." He will point out the differences between China's restrictions and the EU's RoHS directives with special emphasis on catalogue, marking, and disclosure requirements.
Get back on track The conference will also provide seminars and technical sessions each day, with the sessions arranged in a series of tracks.One of the hour-long seminars, "Synchronous Rectification Technique: Classification, Review, Comparison," led by Rais Miftakhutdinov, senior member of the technical staff at Texas Instruments, will cover design issues that need to be solved to meet practical requirements. Specifically, this seminar will examine pre-biased voltage startup; reliable operation at wide input voltage and load current range; accurate timing while driving synchronous rectifier MOSFETs; and preventing current circulation during parallel operation.
During the two-hour technical sessions, industry experts will present papers on such topics as "Power Design & Management" and "Emerging Applications." The latter session will include such papers as:
- "Powering the Next Generation of AMD Opteron Processors" by George Schuellein, a director at International Rectifier
- "Current Sharing Approaches to Meet High-Power PoE Requirements" by Ramesh Khanna, principal power applications engineer at National Semiconductor
- "Wide Vin Range Power Supply Design for Power over Ethernet plus Auxiliary Inputs" by Robert L. Selders, staff applications engineer at National Semiconductor
- "Powering Next-Generation CMOS Loads" by Paul Greenland, vice president of marketing at Enpirion and session chair
Besides the seminars and technical sessions, there will be much more to do, with more than 80 exhibitors in attendance and several product teardowns scheduled. The conference will run from October 30 to November 1 at the Hilton Anatole in Dallas. For more, go to www.powerelectronicsshow.com.