You can simplify design complexity and increase your energy-efficiency in limited PCB space with Fairchild’s low-, mid- and high- power LED Lighting solutions. Benefits for your designs include an extended system life, reduced lifetime costs, and ability to meet the most stringent global energy regulations. Typical applications include LED lighting strips, desk lamps, HID street lighting, medical lighting, mobile display and much more. Watch this video to lean how to simplify your designs.
It was another great year for the Fairchild Semiconductor Beach to Beacon team. Approximately 60 employees completed the race, and our ‘first timers’ turned in impressive results. One of our company goals is to instill healthy living practices within our work force and this 10k race is one of the key events employees participate in each year.
We are also proud to be the Green Corporate Sponsor for the event. The Beach to Beacon has the reputation as one of the most environmentally friendly road races, with ambitious goals to increase recycling, composting and reducing traffic to and from the event.
Energy efficiency and protecting the environment are key elements of our business and culture. We design and manufacture products to optimize system power, helping consumers reduce energy consumption and their global environmental footprint.
Congratulations to ALL the runners and volunteers that made this year’s event a success! We’re already planning for next year.
As part of a three year partnership, Fairchild Semiconductor is supporting Habitat for Humanity’s most advanced development on the West Coast, a 36 home condominium complex for families in need. Fairchild Semiconductor is donating both time and money to Habitat for Humanity and helping create a healthier environment for our community by constructing energy efficient, ADA compatible affordable homes.
Today, a group of employees gathered at the Daly City construction site and separated into teams. One team gathered bundles of joists that were securely hoisted to the second floor of the complex. The team created a framework to hold the joists in place by nailing braces to the joists one at a time. “The framework became robust in a modest amount of time” says team member, Art.
While Art’s team installed floor joists and braces for four units on the 3rd floor of the housing complex another team cut and installed grab bar backing for ADA convertible bathrooms as part of a green building practice. Andrea constructed sawhorses in order to create an elevated surface to make wood cutting easier, and Naveen cut wood panels to go into wheelchair accessible bathrooms.
A group of employees volunteered to work from the scaffolding and focused on the outer walls of the building. Dennis says, “we were hanging wallboard and putting in nails.”
“When you’re out of nails your team members pass you more. This is the same principle I see at Fairchild; we collaborate together to achieve a solution. Volunteering today was a thoroughly enjoyable experience,” says Ravi.
By the end of the day there were tangible results for the community and volunteers were fulfilled. Fairchild will participate in routine team building projects with Habitat for Humanity throughout the three year endeavor.
With the demand for AC-DC external power supplies projected to increase from just over 3 billion units in 2010 to 4.97 billion units in 2014, and because this is a key growth area of communications, driven by mobile phones, finding ways to reduce standby power is essential.
These growth numbers are indicators of the scope of the problems associated with reducing standby power consumption. On one level, the growth in external power supplies is a proxy for the growth in the appliances and electronic equipment segments that populate more homes and offices worldwide. On another level, consider that the single biggest application for power adapters-cell phone chargers-typically sit plugged in and unused for 20 hours a day, wasting energy that entire time.
A typical American home has 40 products constantly drawing power (standby power). Together these amount to almost 10 percent of residential electricity use, or about $220 per year. Figures for most developed countries also show 5 percent to 10 percent of power consumption going to standby power.
When you look at the cumulative data, the scope of the situation is more dramatic. In the US the collective bill for standby power usage now exceeds $4 billion annually. Altogether (offices and homes) standby power use is roughly responsible for 1 percent of the global CO2 emissions. Further, experts agree that a majority of standby power consumption can be eliminated with regulatory policies, smart engineering and changes in personal habits.
To help designers meet the ultra-low standby power challenge they face, Fairchild Semiconductor developed mWSaverTM technology. Offering best-in-class power savings for power supplies, with the fewest possible components, devices in this series integrate five patented technologies: off-time modulation, JFET HV start-up and circuit, feedback impedance switch, HV discharge, and PSR control to drop out voltage; as well as burst mode operation and low operation current techniques. It is only by integrating these unique technologies, leveraged together, that the most stringent standby specifications can be met.
Take the FAN302HL for example. This device is a highly integrated PWM that provides several features to enhance the performance of general flyback converters, including constant-current control and a proprietary topology that enables simplified circuit designs without secondary feedback circuitry, especially important in battery charger applications. Using the FAN302HL, the standby power of a typical charger can be reduced to under 10mW, compared to roughly 400mW.
By developing solutions like mWSaver technology and the FAN302HL, Fairchild enables engineers to drive innovation in their designs for maximum performance, simplify designs and reduce bill of materials costs. To learn more, visit http://www.fairchildsemi.com/products/mwsaver/
About the author: Dr. Efficiency is a member of IEEE and the 85+ standards team as well as other prestigious electronic societies. He is the company’s expert in power efficiency, and when he’s not in the lab inventing he enjoys karaoke and table tennis and spending time with family and friends. He’s also passionate about blogging on all things related to energy efficiency.
Education: PhD in Electrical Engineering from Asia School of Engineering
Written by Ming-Chang Tsou, Tim-Lee and Kenny-Chan
Energy-saving technologies have been the focus of today’s electronics, particularly in the area of standby power consumption. Standby power consumption is important since many electronic devices are in standby mode a great deal of time, and this is where there can be tremendous opportunities to save power.
To reduce standby power and meet the latest ENERGY STAR specifications, Fairchild has incorporated several clever features to enhance the performance of flyback converters and achieve under 30 mW power consumption at standby mode with 230 Vac input for most SMPS (switched mode power supplies) designs. These innovations include high-voltage startup circuitry, ultra-deep burst mode at light load, low operating current at light load, and a patented HV device discharging X-cap Ax-CAP™ technique to save external parts, and give engineers added reliability and a lower BOM cost when compared to solutions using discrete components.
Read this article from Power Management DesignLine for more on minimizing standby power consumption.
The emergence of energy-efficiency standards and the continued evolution of processing and feature sets to support new products that consumers and enterprises use in everyday life have changed the methodologies employed for addressing dc power conversion, management, and distribution.
Many consumer product designs traditionally haven’t been as concerned with standby-power dissipation, dynamic load currents, or smaller form factors as, for instance, the wireless handset industry. The advent of these challenges in addressing power-management solutions is driving new thinking in the selection of power regulators for powering ASICs, DSP chips, systems-on-a-chip (SOCs) with a core, memory, and I/O supplies in these products.
Global attention continues to focus on the methods for achieving low power consumption and high efficiency. Lighting represents nearly 20% of the worldwide consumption of electrical resources and advancements in lighting can have a tremendous impact.
LED solid-state lighting (SSL) is environmentally friendly for the global environment. It has a smart form factor, long life, high conversion efficiency, and substantially reduces power consumption up to 80% or 90% compared to traditional incandescent lighting.
LED drivers play an important role in LED SSLs, as these drivers provide accurate current to maintain a stable brightness. However, the traditional approach of the LED driver used a secondary feedback circuitry for driving LED’s voltage and current. This secondary feedback circuit increases the cost and size.
Read this article in Hearst Electronic Products, which describes a patented primary-side regulation (PSR) technology. This PSR controller precisely regulates the voltage and current of the LED driver in the primary side of the transformer without the need for secondary feedback circuitry. It includes a frequency-hopping technique to reduce EMI and a green mode function to reduce standby power losses. With this approach, a PSR charger can achieve a smaller form factor, lower standby power and higher efficiency compared with conventional designs, such as ringing choke converter (RCC) and traditional PWM.
A USB wireless modem, USB dongle, or USB data card can be used along with notebook and tablet PCs to access the Internet as needed. Recently, LTE (Long Term Evolution) supportive modems have been introduced to make a step towards the 4G generation of mobile telephony.
Read this article in EETimes, which focuses on power management solutions for GSM/GPRS mobile systems.
As the trends for greater efficiency and power consumption increase, the concern for heat transfer increases as well. Designers have already taken the necessary steps to improve heat transfer at rails requiring higher power such as at the CPU and GPU, by incorporating various thermal dissipation methods. But what about the DC/DC power supplies? Power engineers are finding that certain areas of the printed circuit board become too hot, and in certain instances, they’ve had to redesign the buck regulator or resort to heat sink usage on the MOSFETs as a last minute fix.
This is where Dual CoolTM packaging comes into play. With today’s top-side cooled packaging technology, the form factor and pad design is different than what engineers are used to seeing. However, there is no issue with familiarity when it comes to Dual Cool packaging versus PQFN because the Dual Cool package is simply a thermal performance upgrade to PQFN. It allows for additional top-side cooling. With enhanced dual path thermal performance and improved parasitics over its wire-bonded predecessors, the use of a heat sink with the Dual Cool package provides even more impressive results.
A heat sinked Dual Cool package allows synchronous buck converters to deliver higher output current, which increases power density. These packages are green, lead-free, RoHS-compliant and available in 3×3 and 5×6 QFN packages.
Written by Chris Bridge, Principal Engineer - System Development, High Power Solution
The introduction of silicon carbide (SiC) diodes has been a welcome solution to the reverse recovery losses in continuous conduction mode (CCM) boost power factor corrector (PFC) converters. While SiC diodes offer negligible reverse recovery charge (Qrr), the forward voltage drop and temperature coefficient often increase the conduction losses in the PFC boost diodes to an unacceptable level.
Fortunately, the recent introduction of interleaved boundary conduction mode (I-BCM) integrated circuit controllers offer a topological solution to the reverse recovery losses in the CCM boost diodes, which eliminates the need for SiC diodes in many applications from 200 to 800 W.
The CCM boost converter has traditionally been the topology of choice for high-power PFC converters operating in excess of 1 kW. It offers excellent total harmonic distortion (THD), universal input voltage range and reasonable efficiency.
At lower power levels, however, the boundary conduction mode (BCM) topology becomes a viable alternative. In BCM PFC converters, the inductor current is allowed to return to zero every switching cycle, which offers many benefits to the designer. The most important benefit is a reduction in power loss by soft-switching the output diode and power MOSFET.
Written by Wayne Seto, Technical Marketing Manager
With the proliferation of cellular mobile handsets, especially smartphones, in the world today where people are connected 24/7, consumers just can’t seem to get enough of the voice calls, emails, text messages and surfing the web. However, all of these activities greatly consume battery life in our handsets; as such, our handhelds lead to that one-bar battery power indicator very quickly. In this article from the June 1, 2010 edition of EDN Asia, Wayne Seto discusses what can be done to prolong the battery life for these handsets so that we can use them longer.
Each quarter, Fairchild Semiconductor introduces new products, tips and tools for power and analog applications in the quarterly Benchmarks magazine. The following Benchmarks Volume 1, 2010 “Engineering Connections” article discusses flyback topology as an efficient solution for meeting today’s global demand for lowering power consumption in power supplies.
External power adapters are instrumental for the operation of virtually all small electronic devices. As many as 3.2 billion adapters are currently in use globally, according to industry estimates.
With this worldwide focus on energy savings, regulatory bodies are examining all ways to “go green,” and standards have been developed, specifying higher levels of efficiency for products such as notebook PC power supplies. Flyback topology has proven to be an effective solution, both in terms of cost and technology, for pulse-width modulated (PWM) power conversion in these products. Fairchild has a wide portfolio of PWM controllers that enhance the performance of flyback converters.
As part of its global focus on energy savings, Fairchild has developed a portfolio of pulse-width modulated (PWM) controllers, which enable notebook power-supply designers to meet the stringent international energy-saving regulations. These include the ENERGY STAR External Power Supply (EPS) version 2.0 requirement that mandates 87 percent average active-mode efficiency to obtain compliance.
Integrated PWM controllers, like the FAN6754, offer designers high-voltage startup to improve energy savings at light load by 25 percent when compared to alternate solutions. It also eliminates external protection circuits by incorporating over-voltage, over-current and over-temperature protection plus brownout and line-compensation functions. Other advantages of Fairchild’s PWM controllers include frequency hopping, which reduces EMI emissions by as much as 5-10 dB, and internal soft start (8ms) to reduce voltage stress on the MOSFET at startup.
Additionally, Fairchild’s PWM controllers incorporate several design features that lower the overall power consumption of notebook adapters, such as a proprietary green-mode function that provides off-time modulation to continuously decrease the switching frequency under light-load conditions. Fairchild’s PWM devices offer a host of robust, accurate protection features built-in to protect the power supply and the load from failure, all without adding external components or circuitry.
The power requirement of LED street lamps being used in China falls in the range of 100~250W. It is widely agreed that if used properly, these kinds of LED street lamps deliver many advantages. What I want to explain here is the ways to make it possible for these lamps to deliver those advantages. The key factors to be considered are high efficiency, power, reliability and cost-effectiveness.
Some low-power lighting requires PFC, while high-power lamps usually require PFC combined with DC/DC requirements. In China where the AC line voltage is 220V, Boundary-Conduction Mode (BCM) PFC controllers, such as the FAN7530 and the FAN6961, become the ideal choice to maintain a balance between the efficiency and performance-cost ratio. These solutions only need a few components.
Low Rds(on) SupreMOS(TM) MOSFETs, can further decrease switch and conduction loss. When used at the boost output, the HyperFAST 2 high voltage diode family with lower Vf can also lower the conduction loss of the diode itself.
For DC/DC topology, there are many choices such as quasi-resonant (QR), double transistor forward (DTF), active-clamp, LLC and asymmetrical half-bridge (AHB). High-power lighting applications, for example in a 100W lamp, where the output voltage is usually a little high, QR working with a synchronous rectifier can achieve up to 92.5% of total efficiency. Moreover, Fairchild has integrated QR and BCM PFC into one package (the FAN6921), reducing external components and simplifying the control.
Another popular topology is zero voltage switch (ZVS). Both an LLC and an AHB can have their two bridges working in zero voltage by implementing a simple circuit. When using Fairchild’s highly-integrated solution (for example, a LLC controller and two MOSFETs in FSFR; an AHB controller and two MOSFETs in FSFA2100), the circuit can be further simplified, with few external components. And the body diode of the MOSFET has good fast recovery characteristic, which can reduce the possibility of short-through, yet provide high reliability with high efficiency. When the output voltage is high, an LLC is the better option; when the output voltage is low, an AHB is more suitable for implementing a self-driven synchronous rectifier, and both can achieve over 93~94% efficiency.
The above solutions are highly integrated solutions and require just a few components, thus delivering high efficiency, high power density, optimized thermal performance as well as high reliability.
Click here for more information on LED lighting from Fairchild.
About the author: Dr. Efficiency is a member of IEEE and the 85+ standards team as well as other prestigious electronic societies. He is the company’s expert in power efficiency, and when he’s not in the lab inventing he enjoys karaoke and table tennis and spending time with family and friends. He’s also passionate about blogging on all things related to energy efficiency.
Education: PhD in Electrical Engineering from Asia School of Engineering
PV inverter technology is driven by efficiency and compliance, but reliability is also important
What modern, ecological houses are wearing this season is blue - more precisely, the dark blue of solar cells. And this trend is gaining momentum, despite the financial crisis and reduction in feed-in tariffs from governments surprised by the success they created.
The owners of these systems are less concerned about the looks. What they are concerned about is high and reliable output. (Think of efficiency in the high 90s at more than 7000 power temperature cycles over lifetime!).
By Guy Moxey, Low Voltage Power, Product Marketing
With the emergence of important climate saving legislation such as 80 PLUS, Climate Savers and EnergyStar® 5, analog designers for DC-DC power systems are striving to meet the challenge of increasing system level efficiency across all operating power states. From this, power silicon products such as power IC’s and power MOSFET’s are now very much in vogue as these devices create and dissipate the vast majority of any low voltage power conversion in-circuit losses that, in turn, directly relate to the system’s overall efficiency.
Take a typical notebook, typical peak efficiencies for a 46A, 2 phase Notebook VCORE solution with PWM controller and discrete MOSFET implementation are typically @90% peak at current ratings of 10A per phase, reducing down to @86% at full loads of 23A. This 10-13% loss in system efficiency is directly proportional to power and thermal dissipation. The complete notebook system is normally @ 50-60W output and running at 85% efficiency so that translates to a 9W power waste for every note book PC in the form of heat and battery life.
At start up or during a heavy processing sequence, the power system is dominated by conduction losses ( I2R) of the low side MOSFET. Here select a ultra high cell density low RDS(ON) FET housed in a dual sided cooled package so that the losses will be significantly minimized. However, as most PC s spend a majority of their operating life in standby or sleep states, it’s essential that the power system allows for light load efficiency management where gate drive and switching losses are predominant at low output currents below 10A. Here driver impedance and MOSFETs have to be carefully optimized. Gate drive voltages of 5V are preferred with MOSFETs with ultra low gate charge.
The driver IC can pulse skip switching cycles to minimize MOSFET switching loss and also low-drive disable to effectively blank out the low side MOSFET completely allow for discontinuous conduction mode operation.
By careful MOSFET selection, close optimization with the driver IC, the design can start to move toward a higher level of overall system efficiency. Full load thermal design points can inch upward toward the 90% level, medium to light load levels can be touching 95% and ultra light loads don’t immediately take a dive southward with such velocity. But while we progress and save a few watts of loss over today’s designs, there is still some significant silicon research and development to be done before the utopian power curve can be seen.
Fairchild Semiconductor (NYSE: FCS) will showcase its latest industry-leading technology at IIC China 2012, in Booth 1Q19, at the Shenzhen Convention and Exhibition Center, from February 23-25.
At Strategies in Light 2012, February 7-9, 2012, at the Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, California, Fairchild Semiconductor will demonstrate LED driver applications, including the highly integrated PFC and PWM controllers which allow designers to reduce BOM count, enable smaller lamp sizes, eliminate design complexity and improve overall lighting […]
Chinese version of the power stage asymmetric dual MOSFETs video provides an overview of a Control MOSFET (High Side) and Synchronous MOSFET (SyncFET) with monolithic Schottky diode (Low Side) integrated in a single package.
Beat Energy Efficiency Regulations with Our Low Standby Power Solutions- mWSaver Technology combines our most energy efficient process and circuit technologies for power adapter design into this unique group of components.
Power Supply WebDesigner (PSW) Design Tool Podcast October 31, 2011
Fairchild's Power Supply WebDesigner (PSW) Design Tool automatically generates a BOM and lets you confidentially save your design for future reference by you or others on your team. Start saving days-to-weeks of engineering time with PSW, whether you're a power supply expert or not.
Power Stage Asymmetric Dual MOSFETs (Chinese) October 21, 2011
The Chinese version of the Power Stage Asymmetric Dual MOSFETs video shows the Control MOSFET (High Side) and Synchronous MOSFET (SyncFET) with monolithic Schottky diode (Low Side) integrated in a single package.
LED Lighting Total Solutions August 15, 2011
Simplify design complexity and increase your energy efficiency in limited PCB space with Fairchild's low-, mid- and high- power LED Lighting solutions
This PDF explains the principles of AC/DC converters in flyback topology having a high power factor input and a constant current output. The most commonly used mode of operation for this purpose is boundary conduction mode (BCM). The basics of this mode are developed and its drawbacks are made clear. A simple method for improving power factor is introduced a […]
This Whitepaper explains the principles of AC/DC converters in flyback topology having a high power factor input and a constant current output. The most commonly used mode of operation for this purpose is boundary conduction mode (BCM). The basics of this mode are developed and its drawbacks are made clear. A simple method for improving power factor is intro […]
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