Power supplies go digital

Digital power techniques have been proposed for some time, but have not been able to compete successfully with analog solutions. Thanks to increasing integrated-circuit density, hard work on the part of semiconductor suppliers, and a mature and reliable, complementary, metal-oxide semiconductor technology, digital processing for power-conversion applications now is very attractive.

More importantly, the use of digital techniques results in capabilities and performance at both the power-supply and system levels that are not possible with analog techniques.

While much of the publicity and controversy about digital power techniques is focused on power-system management issues, the most important issue – and the ultimate driver for its acceptance – will be the benefits that they bring to power supply itself. These benefits are real, measurable and available with toda's technology.

Benefits include: improved efficiency; improved reliability due to higher integration of digital control circuitry; reduced system cost because of fewer decoupling capacitors due to enhanced load transient response of adaptive digital control; increased power-supply density due to smaller digital control circuitry; tighter output-voltage tolerances due to enhanced initial set-point trimming; and lower overall cost of ownership.