Every piece of electronics in your home, work and life must be powered. This power is made possible through analog or digital components – or at times, both.
Conventionally, power is transmitted at a high voltage to our homes and businesses. A power supply has to be used to convert that power to something most electronic appliances, and the semiconductor circuits (chips) in them, can use. Power supplies can be made using different types of control, and traditionally, analog control has been used. As our world becomes more digital, from our clocks to our televisions, power supplies have also become digital.
Digital power is not new to power supply systems. Digital control has been used for more than a quarter century, but has been applied to higher power systems used in industrial applications, like very large motors, uninterruptable power supplies (UPS), energy storage and renewable energy systems. These systems typically require 3 kilowatts or more power.
But that has started to change.
Dave Freeman, who focuses on high voltage power solutions, explains why:
Remember when cellphones used to be analog, and they were pretty good at enabling conversations? When cellphones first turned digital, you could still understand the words, but you couldn’t understand who was talking, because you lost some of the fidelity in the voice quality. Now you look at how digital has improved in cellphones and all the things digital brought to the cellphone market. If you didn’t have digital cellular, you wouldn’t have text messaging, Web access, streaming videos and apps on your smartphone. Digital power evolved the same way. Digital power can now address a broad range of power conversion including systems requiring only a few watts, while enabling new functionality to power management.
As our electronics depend more and more on digital circuits like embedded processors, memory systems and video systems, among others, many engineers started to consider digital power as a more integrated part of their systems. In these systems, engineers instantly found what they always craved when it came to power – better control. Much like cellphones going from analog to digital, engineers gained more control over the power supply and also slowly gained flexibility in how they sent power to the components of electronic systems.
“If you can communicate digitally to the power supply, you can control it more naturally given that the systems are mostly digital circuits. Early in digital power adoption, it was all about the power management part of it,” Dave said.
Digital power showed the promise to be more integrated, resulting in fewer chips or a single chip efficiently performing the duties of multiple components.
Today, we have extended from the early application of digital power in systems powered by 3 kilowatts or more to commercial and consumer systems requiring less power, in many cases below 100 watts, such as sub-systems used in telecommunication servers or renewable energy microinverters (very small power supplies that convert power from a solar panel to power that can be put on the electrical grid).
This doesn’t mean that analog power components are no longer needed. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. Even a power supply has smaller power supplies within it, most of which are made from analog components. Our engineers have found some of their greatest successes in flexibility, cost effectiveness and efficiency when digital and analog power components are combined.
Sometimes the solution starts with analog circuits and integrates digital functionality. In other cases, the engineer starts with a mostly digital device and adds analog functionality. This partitioning plays in a variety of applications today with more being discovered regularly.
In solar inverters, which take solar power and turn it into power that mimics grid electricity, the size of the overall component decreases with digital power, while increasing in efficiency. Essentially, less power is lost during the transition from solar energy to grid electricity. A very significant benefit for digital power is the ability to manage the various rules regulators have in place when connecting solar inverters to the grid. For example, the need to quickly shut off the connection between a solar panel and the electricity grid in an emergency or safety situation, and then reconnect the solar power when the grid can safely accept the power.
Digital power has been found to be a great option in cell tower power system to ensure continuous power to the complex systems needed to keep mobile networks up and running. These power systems can draw power from the grid or from the battery backup system. These systems also must keep the battery charged for maximum operation if the grid fails. Digital power provides many options for optimum power conversion as well as managing how the power is used.
In factory automation, particularly test automation, there are a large number of different power supplies. To carefully choreograph these different power supplies, complex power management must take place – something easily enabled by digital power. For example, some portions of a system under test must be powered up before another part of a system can be powered.
Large data centers require many racks of server and storage. These systems must be able to be serviced without bringing the full system down. The management of hot-swapping (plugging and unplugging servers while the connector remains powered) components are enabled using digital power technology.
Finally, in situations where the power supply must remain available, uninterruptable power supply (UPS) systems and energy storage systems are used, and can see great benefits from digital power. UPSs are used everywhere from home-offices to retail stores to office floors to buildings such as hospitals and other buildings where critical equipment power cannot be lost. Like cell tower operations, power typically comes from the grid, but when the grid goes down, a battery is used to maintain the power to the equipment. Digital power allows these systems to maximize the utility of the power management components by prioritizing what gets power depending upon the situation. Additionally, digital power easily interfaces to the powered system to offer impressive reaction times when a power disturbance occurs.
For all of these applications and more, TI has the broadest digital power portfolio.
“We pride ourselves on the most complete solutions for digital power through the combination of devices from our power and embedded businesses. From our digitally enabled analog power management to our UCD family of targeted digital power solutions to the industry’s highest performance digital power solution products, the C2000™ Piccolo™ microcontroller (MCU) product line, we have devices that make controlling and managing power digitally simple,” said Peggy Liska in C2000 MCU marketing for digital power and solar applications. “They address some of the newest technologies and devices introduced to the market.”
Digital power has come a long way, but the potential of digital power still has much more to offer. Our engineers are constantly pushing the boundaries of possible to create differentiating products that will change the digital power world.