d Bloom died at the age of 74 on January 2, 2015 and with his passing, the power electronics industry lost a major contributor. We express our sympathy and condolences to Joy Bloom, his wife of many years.

Ed Bloom was named a Lifetime Achievement Winner and known as a champion of power electronics education who devoted much of his career to spreading knowledge of practical power-supply design and unlocking the mysteries of magnetics. Though he's spent many of his 40-plus years doing power-supply design and consulting, he was best known throughout the industry as an instructor, author and innovator in magnetics design. Together with his wife, Joy, Ed hosted some of the first courses on topics such as power-magnetics design, power-supply control methods and stability analysis and took power electronics education to the engineer, repeating his classes in different cities across the country.

Chief among his technical contributions was his development of integrated magnetics — the combination of multiple magnetic structures on a single core. For his work in this area, Bloom has been called the “Father of Integrated Magnetics.” Bloom was awarded multiple patents and authored many conference papers based on his work in this area His most well-known writing on the magnetics topic may be found in the now-classic textbook Modern DC-to-DC Switchmode Power Converter Circuits, which he co-authored with Rudy Severns.

In addition to his work on integrated magnetics, Bloom also was involved in writing and teaching about planar magnetics around 1990. These components, which may first have been developed for the military, became popular in commercial telecom applications in the 1980s and 1990s because their low profile and use of standard core materials together with pc-board traces (in place of conventional windings) allowed for very flat component designs.

Beyond his business activities, Bloom contributed to the industry through his extensive participation in industry conferences in the United States and Europe, where he presented numerous papers and seminars. Between these activities and his business ventures, Bloom has given more than 120 technical courses and presentations on his work experiences.

Over the years, Ed Bloom was a very active and a strong supporter of PSMA and APEC. He was a member and contributor to the PSMA Magnetics Technical Committee and led the effort to identify out of print classic books on magnetics and power electronics which were reprinted by PSMA and made available to the industry.

May He Rest in Peace.

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