PowerViews

Conferences and Forums

July 16, 2012

Optimizing for Greater Energy Savings

Patrick Le Fèvre
Marketing and Communication Director, Ericsson Power Modules

Power Channels: Communications Power, Digital Power, European Power News, Power Components, Switch-Mode Power

Increasing demands are being made for engineers to think energy smart and make better use of available power, while also meeting the requirements of highly complex systems and components. In addition to which, today’s designers – and perhaps we should call them power system architects – have growing pressure to bring products that offer more functionality and performance and in a faster time-to-market. Engineers also have to deal with a lot of new parameters when they consider power for a design, particularly as FPGAs and ASICs will usually require a number of different voltages over the system or board level design cycle. So, board power management is becoming increasingly complex and next-generation products are implementing more power rails with widely different supply requirements. As an example, one of Ericsson’s customers in the datacom arena is developing a router product that has more than 60 power rails – and each one of these rails needs to be controlled and managed in a different way.

The advantages that digital power control can bring at the board level are well known, or at least they should be. There is now much evidence that digital control and energy optimization significantly adds benefits compared to existing analog platforms, especially providing the ability to monitor and adjust certain parameters to meet load conditions. Clearly, an important key development in the datacom industry over the past decade or so has been the introduction of the Intermediate Bus Architecture (IBA). The most advanced power systems today use an IBA, comprising Advanced Bus Converters (ABC) and digital Point-Of-Load (POL) converters, especially in ATCA applications. Large companies in the telecom and datacom industry were the first to adopt this approach, but increasingly medium- or even small-size companies in the industrial area are now starting to migrate to the IBA.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the Intermediate Bus Converter (IBC) moving from being a passive power source, converting a system voltage to sub-system, to an active and intelligent power source, culminating in the development of the Advanced Bus Converter. Commodity mixed-signal processes now allow silicon architects to pack a measurement and control subsystem and communications interface alongside the digital PWM controller core at negligible additional cost, enabling products that are electrically superior to analog designs.

The Advanced Bus Converter exploits digital inner-loop control, which enables the adaptation to line and load conditions in real time and mitigates losses using various techniques, including adaptive dead-time control, to deliver significant performance benefits over their analogue counterparts. The digital power platform also enables a raft of programmable functions that range from setting constants such as output voltage, sequencing delays and slew rates, and fault-condition thresholds in a one-time programming step to dynamically optimize key parameters in a running system. Using its SMBus hardware basis and a standard power-control command language – the PMBus protocol – it becomes easy to explore and implement a level of control that is unprecedented in analog converters, enabling compelling opportunities for power system architects in their designs.

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