PowerViews

Conferences and Forums

January 28, 2013

Power Conversion: The Old Analog Versus Digital... or is It Analog AND Digital?

Stephen Stella
Product Line Marketing Manager, Analog & Inte, Microchip Technology Inc.

Power Channels: Digital Power, Power Components, Switch-Mode Power

Emerging hybrid, or mixed-signal, power conversion controllers entering the marketplace are turning the "Analog vs. Digital" mentality into a "Best of Digital Plus Best of Analog" pragmatism. These devices aim to leverage the strengths of both analog and digital solutions, while mitigating their collective weaknesses. By combining analog and digital, it becomes feasible to incorporate the flexibility offered by digital solutions with the efficient performance, transient response, and load regulation found in analog solutions.

Ultimately, we live in an analog world. This puts so digital solutions at a disadvantage because they require information (feedback) to be digitized, typically through an analog-to-digital converter, and then the digital control must be processed in a high-speed MCU (or DSP). The bandwidth of the digital control loop is directly related to the speed of the A/D conversion as well as the computational speed of the MCU/DSP. Want more bandwidth? Then higher-speed A/Ds and MCUs are required, and, unsurprisingly, are more expensive! Analog’s inherent strength is that it collects and maintains information in the analog domain, so a high-performance MCU or A/D converter is not required.

While analog power solutions offer very efficient control, it is not very flexible. Analog power— supply design engineers must evaluate the performance tradeoffs in the application and then optimize the analog design over the entire operating space, as well as the load profile. Although that technique has been sufficient for many years, market and industry trends, consumer expectations, and government regulations, are quickly outpacing the ability of analog design techniques to satisfy ever more efficiency requirements. The solution: power devices must offer more flexibility. This flexibility can then be used, among other things, to:

Enable multi-point power-conversion optimization, rather than optimizing across the entire power-conversion operating range
Perform as part of a system, meaning that it must be configurable to optimize the system’s efficiency over time, rather than just the power-conversion efficiency
Communicate information out to the system, enabling system optimization

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