The global power discretes and modules market in 2007 increased by 9.3% to US$13.6 billion from US$12.5 billion in 2006, according to a study by IMS Research, and is expected to grow at an average annual rate of 8-9% over the next five years. With the combined effect of rising oil prices and the growing need for environmental protection, power efficiency has emerged as one of the top issues among semiconductor companies. Developing products and technologies for enhanced efficiency or better management of power in a variety of applications - such as electrical motor drives, power supplies, computing equipment, consumer products, lighting equipment, as well as automotive, where power semiconductors are key to improving fuel efficiency and reducing emissions - poses new challenges for the semiconductor industry.
There are fundamental power constraints in both portable devices and wall-powered applications. Power consumption of portables has been doubled at the expense of higher demand for performance and functions, while the wall power consumed by data storage centers, servers, etc, already accounts for about 1.5% of the energy consumed in the US, according to Samuel Fuller, vice president, R&D and CTO of Analog Devices. "More performance can only be achieved through further reducing power consumption."
People have been focusing on performance,
rather than on power, which has led to some heavy use of power in the
past. But now they are starting to look at architectural changes (e.g.
multi-core processing), and materials (e.g. high-k) improvements, so
that they can gain more power. "A lot of power losses are from the
sources. If you can reduce these losses, more power can be gained,"
Fuller said.
Bogdan Duduman, senior manager, applications engineering, Computing Power Management of Intersil takes a similar view. He believes that there is a constant challenge to lower the cost and increase the efficiency. He pointed out that there are always achievable technologies for more power or more efficient power, but they just have not reached a point where the cost justifies the technologies.
Apart from the macro-view in power management, the micro-view down to component level also presents challenges to manufacturers. For example, new generations of mobile phones - one of the applications for which power efficiency is essential - raise new obstacles for power management hardware designers. Mobile devices are becoming multi-functional, and more phones are equipped with multi-mode, multi-band operations, boosting the need for multi-mode power amplifiers. However a single device doing multi-mode doesn't even exist now, according to Beth Logan, product line manager, Linear Products of Skyworks. The current solution is to employ multiple power amplifiers, which is not efficient.
Battery techniques also need changing, according to Kevin Walsh, strategic marketing manager of RFMD. He claims that the transition of batteries to higher capacity is not desirable, as this lowers the operation voltage. Manufacturers have to tune power amplifiers to work at a lower voltage, which is not good for more efficient power management in the analog world.
With all these challenges, the semiconductor companies are working hard to develop solutions, and the integration of power management functions into components is one feasible solution.
Steven Lutz, director, Strategic Marketing, IC Business Unit of Allegro Microsystems, said, "We see there is a trend of integrating power management functions into ICs. In the past low-cost power management ICs have been used in high volume, but with the increasing concern in power efficiency, higher performance power management ICs are now being integrated into a lot of applications such as motor control."
Walsh of RFMD agrees: "People are realizing
there are benefits in having a power amplifier in the system, instead
of having a separate one that merely adds cost. Some [companies] are
also looking at [including] other architectures on components, such as
buck converters, buck boost type."
Skyworks is also keen on integration to reduce the energy loss during transmission: "Today many of the metering applications are assembled using components from different suppliers, which are inefficient, low performance, and costly. Our company's complete knowledge on the whole design, and its ability to integrate the components, allow us to come up with a system-level design which realizes significant reduction in board area compared with other products."
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