Modular Power meeting the Market demands

Article Written By: Dermot Flynn

Changes in the electronics industry and today's tough market conditions have brought about many new innovations as companies seek to gain competitive market advantage. The market demands rapid time to market, smaller systems, increased functionality and lower running costs. These are the key design challenges that the system designer faces. The pace of new innovation set by industry leaders has resulted in shorter product life cycles across the industry, which in turn has demanded shorter product design cycles.

Shortened product design cycles are now a survival imperative: product concepts must move into production in the shortest possible time. This trend is prevalent in all industries from Communications, Computing, Industrial and Medical Electronics. Power supply definition is often the final design considerations of a system designer. This usually takes place when the broad product design is complete, and voltage and current requirements can be defined with a degree of certainty. Definition at this stage of a design often creates problems in power supply selection, integration and sourcing particularly if the voltage and current requirements are in anyway non-standard and there is always the risk that power requirements may change.

The conflict between market demands for short design cycle and the hard fact that a custom design lead-time into production can be months and even over a year increases the pressures the Designer Manager now faces. In addition, the shorter product life cycles and new market requirements often demand that system upgrades and modifications are required relatively soon after a product launches. In short in any project the power supply becomes an unacceptably high-risk element of the design.

Obviously, the traditional power supply development and delivery times cannot fulfil these requirements. Rapid delivery of prototypes and production volumes are required in order to ensure the system manufacturers competitiveness and mobility in the market place.

The advent of modular switching power supplies, built from standard modules, configured to meet system specifications has helped relieve the pressure on the design manager. After defining the system requirements, a system designer can configure a new power supply with a unique output voltage and current configuration matched to the application in hand from datasheets and on-line configuration tools. The modular power supply is a based on a building block design that comprises 2 major stages. The input stage takes the AC mains and converts to power factor corrected power. The output stage takes this power, and via a selection of output modules configured provides single or multiple regulated DC outputs at the specified voltages.

This type of power platform provides a number of advantages to the system designer and manufacturer. From a design perspective, they provide the exact power supply required at prototyping stage, with minimal delivery time. They also provide a pre-approved power supply meeting safety agency approvals, reducing safety costs significantly, and more importantly, the time associated with these securing these approvals. This is achieved because the individual power platforms and output modules carry global agency safety approvals irrespective of the required configuration. Medical versions with low leakage are also available as standard.

Manufacturing benefits include the virtual elimination of inventories of custom power supplies, reducing the risk of carrying obsolete material before it can be used. This is due to the shorter production lead-times associated with modular power supplies. In addition un-forecasted (and often required immediately) system production requirements can be supported, with the shorter power supply lead-times, allowing manufacturers to be more reactive to market needs, with minimal disruption to their production.

System designers consistently face the dual challenges of system size reduction, without impacting functionality. In fact the market regularly demands increased functionality in conjunction with size reduction. As a consequence the power supply must also reduce in size, without compromising in output power. Often it is the final part to be defined by the system designer and this generally limits the space available for the power supply as the mechanical size of the system is already defined.

System efficiency is rapidly becoming an environmental issue. Increasing environmental awareness as raised by groups such as the EPA is demanding higher system efficiencies. A significant benefit of higher efficiency is the reduction of system running costs. Moving from 75% to 90% efficient power supplies can reduce system running costs by greater than 10%.

Designers are facing significant technological and commercial challenges in system design. Performance improvements in terms of efficiency, functionality, and size are a must. Coupled with the shorter development times demanded by the market, the designer criteria in power supply selection are more stringent than ever before. Higher efficiency, higher power density, rapid prototyping and production availability mean that modular power supplies.

In summary, standardising on higher efficiency, higher power density modular power supplies can provide businesses a significant competitive advantage. Simplified system design and approvals, reduces design cycle time and improved time to market and can reduce life cycle costs significantly for the user and will improve bottom line profitability.

About the Author

Dermot Flynn is author of this article on Medical Power Supply. Find more information about Low Noise Power Supply here.

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