Other news of interest

The Power Sources Manufacturers Association announces a series of webinars as a lead-up to the next edition of the PSMA Power Technology Roadmap (PTR). The webinar series, organized by the PSMA Power Technology Roadmap Committee, will feature invited experts from different fields to offer a range of technological perspectives. In addition to setting the groundwork and providing input for the next PTR, the webinars will give participants access to expert opinions on technology trends and include a question and answer session at the end of each session.

The webinar series will include a number of highly regarded industry and academic experts covering a variety of topics covering components, systems, packaging and applications. The series began on February 20 with a presentation by Ajay Hari of ON Semiconductor "Utilizing WBG Devices in Next Generation Power Converters." Two webinars were held in May, "JEDEC JC-70 Issues Industry First Guidelines for Testing and Evaluating Wide Bandgap Power Devices" presented by Stephanie Watts Butler, Texas Instruments and Peter Friedrichs, Infineon; and "Powering & Retrofitting IoT Devices for Industry 4.0" by Mike Hayes and Peter Haigh, Tyndall National Institute. Future topics include "Ultra-High Density Double-Sided Half-Bridge Packaging with Organic Laminates", "Advanced Packaging Concepts for Wide Band Gap Power Electronics", "Switching Performance of Wide Band Gap Devices", and many others.

Webinars are tentatively scheduled to be held every other Thursday from 10:00-11:00 a.m. Central Time. For updates to the schedule and news of webinars that will be added, please visit: www.psma.com/technical-forums/roadmap/news-events and follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter. To join the PSMA mailing list to receive invitations to all upcoming webinars, sign up at  www.psma.com/webforms/psma-email

The Power Technology Roadmap provides a consolidated outlook of trends in power conversion technology for the next two to five years. The trends provided in the report are intended to give a broad outlook of the power conversion technologies, components and applications. The complete Roadmap document has been published every two or three years, incorporating the content of the Roadmap Webinars Series conducted over the months prior to publication. The other content for the PTR is sourced from recognized industry experts and comprises write-ups about trends in components, applications, emerging technologies and university research. It also includes a comprehensive projection of key metrics evolution in four selected power conversion technologies (ac-dc front-end power supplies, ac-dc external power supplies, isolated dc-dc converters and non-isolated dc-dc converters).

Conor Quinn of Artesyn Embedded Technologies and Dhaval Dalal of ACP Technologies, Power Technology Roadmap Committee Co-chairs, stated; "The PTR webinars provide a window into technology trends and the presentations are unique in terms of their diversity of perspectives, commercial-free tone and the opportunity they offer for the audience to interact with industry experts. We are always looking to enrich and expand our panel of webinar presenters and we welcome suggestions and proposals from prospective speakers." Joe Horzepa, PSMA Executive Director, added that the Committee "welcomes and invites subject matter experts who are willing to actively participate and contribute to the development of the next PSMA Power Technology Roadmap to contact the PSMA Association Office at power@psma.com."

The PSMA Board of Directors is seeking one or more volunteers interested in providing leadership for the Safety & Compliance Technical Committee. The membership in all the PSMA Technical Committees is comprised of individual volunteers from both Member and non-Member Companies who have a technical, business or personal interest and are involved in the focus of the specific Technical Committee.

An important role of the Technical Committee leadership is to coordinate the mission and focus of the committee to address the current issues and changing trends in the technologies. Each of the Technical Committees normally meet monthly via teleconference for one hour to discuss special Projects that PSMA might fund that would benefit the membership and industry, to consider and plan Industry Sessions for upcoming APEC meetings, and to support the PSMA Power Technology Roadmap with relevant Webinars and technical content. The leadership position is the chair (or co-chair) for each meeting and is responsible for generating the monthly meeting agenda and to facilitate the meeting to meet the interests of the participants.

The benefits of Technical Committee leadership are many, including:

• Being acknowledged as an important participant and factor in the technical community
• Opportunity to interact with National, State and Independent Agencies involved with the specific technologies
• Anticipate and influence changes especially in regulations and technologies
• Identify your company as an important participant and contributor in the industry segment
• An expanded ability to network with others in the industry

Additional information on this opportunity is available here.

Please contact the Association Office (power@psma.com, 973-543-9660) for more information on the specific responsibilities for the Chair and/or Co-chair of the Safety and Compliance Technical Committee.

The Power Sources Manufacturers Association has drafted a power electronics timeline and a "corporate" genealogy chart for the industry to review. As we get inputs, we will be updating these files on a periodic basis. Consequently these files are subject to change until we hear from all affected parties or until enough time has transpired at which time the files will be finalized.

If you have any inputs to share, please contact ada@adaclock.com or the PSMA office.
 

The Handbook of Standardized Terminology For The Power Sources Industry-Third Edition - has been made available as a download on the Members Only area of the PSMA website. Revised and expanded, this unique publication includes definitions for more than 1200 terms related to power electronics which were especially selected for the power electronics professional. The Third Edition also contains illustrations and four new appendices, including a listing of EMI specifications, excerpts from international standards of units and symbols, along with guides for authors of technical papers. Many new magnetic terms are described in this new 126-page third edition that are of particular interest to the practicing designer and marketer of power supplies and related products. Valuable information regarding worldwide power sources, standards agencies, and military specifications has been retained, updated and expanded from the previous edition. Titles of the appendices are: Testing and Standards Agencies; Designer's Reference; World Voltages and Frequencies; Military Specifications; EMI Specifications; Writing Technical Papers for Archival Publications; Units, Symbols and Style Guide; A Brief Writing Guide. These added resources provide concise, easy-to-use references for engineeers involved in technical writing and presentations. If your company is a member of PSMA, you may register for the "Members Only" area using your email address. The registration form requires you to enter your company PSMA member number. You may contact the Association Office if you do not know the member number.

Years ago we had to surround ourselves with printed reference material to provide the data on components used in our designs and applications papers to help in their use. Many of these were free, but some others cost over $100 each and became obsolete almost as fast as we obtained them. Today, the picture has changed dramatically. Most of this information is available at no cost through the Internet; the amount of information is so huge that the new challenge is sorting it out. When the semiconductor committee of PSMA began to study the problem of helping engineers find the information needed, the change in the way we do our jobs became blatantly obvious. Even this task has been made easier, because of help from the Internet.

Here is our conclusion: Google is perhaps the most advanced search engine in the world at this time. Surprisingly, it’s not just for lay people who are looking for new recipes or ways to remodel their bedrooms. Its capability to provide us with the sophisticated technical help we need is astounding. It has the capacity to improve its performance, on its own, as it is used. Our job in helping our members and others in the industry has been reduced from one of searching, rating and cataloging materials to one of simply providing a few hints about using Google. We suggest you try it for yourself, get familiar with its capability, and use it the next time you need information. Here are some examples for you to try:

1. Go to Google.com and type in power factor correction. Our result was that 2,190,000 references were retrieved in 0.23 seconds. Now, type in “power factor correction” and see the difference. We got 155,000 references in about the same amount of time. What is even more amazing is that the references were valid! Even in the first case---we looked through the first 120 on the list, and didn’t find even one irrelevant citing.

2. Try “mag amp” and retrieve 8,870 references. All were valid until we got down to the 29th one on the list, which referred to a slow-release garden fertilizer. 28 out of 29 is a validity score of 96.6%---not bad for software!!!

In Example 1 we saw the difference of enclosing the phrase in quotation marks. Doing so causes the search engine to look for precisely that phrase. Without this, the search engine will find hits on each of the words individually, inviting irrelevant references.

To the right of the search window on the home page you will find “Advanced Search.” Clicking on it will produce a page full of easy-to-use tricks to improve the search, including “Advanced Search Tips” on the top line of the page. This gives even more useful information to produce more effective results. Google is so easy that if you’ll spend only 5 minutes with it, you’ll be producing better results than you can find in a world-class library, without leaving your desk. Try it first, then try other search engines. We did this, and found a plethora of irrelevant “hits.” We invite your comments.

The following documents are provided to assist you in your technical writing. Please note that if you would like a hard copy of the Units, Symbols & Styles Guide in a handy one-page format, you may purchase copies in the Publications Section.

A discussion of criteria to consider when deciding whether you should make or buy power supplies when creating equipment.