Innovelec | Power Management

Power Management

Improving Efficiency, Preventing Damage and Reducing Interference.

Power management now embodies far more than improving efficiency and saving wasted energy. Protecting electronics from damage reduces down-time, cost and ultimately waste. Reducing interference is now a regulatory requirement and often cause product delays due to poor design.

Protection and System Monitoring

The vast majority of today’s handheld devices are powered by rechargeable batteries and are charged via a USB port. Not all chargers are equal and they often fail. Incorporating integrated Overvoltage and Surge Protection (OVP) circuits help protect devices vulnerable to input overvoltage and current surges caused by input power supply faults. These circuits protect themselves and fragile downstream components.

USB Type-C dominates new products today. As this interface now serves far more than just a charging port a need arises to protect data lines. Use of circuits to protect against electro static discharges (ESD), surge and overvoltage greatly enhances reliability but should not compromise performance.

Display Power

LCD displays use LEDs for backlighting. The industry is driving efficiencies up and adding dimming functions as standard. Now driver circuits feature high-efficiency operation with high accuracy at low dimming duty cycles. To enhance reliability, products are designed with several protection mechanisms including LED short-circuit, LED open-circuit and over-current.

Coloured LEDs are now commonplace in electrical products. Driver circuits are now enhancing functionality by providing user adjustable blick-rate control, fine-gradient fade-in fade-out, resulting in unique colour lighting patterns.

Camera flash technology comes thanks to super high efficiency LED driver circuits which not only provide multiple flash but preserve battery life too.

Power over Ethernet

Power over Ethernet (PoE) has emerged as a preferred technology for delivering remote power to connected devices such as CCTV cameras and Door Entry keypads. Often the installation of a power outlet or source near the remote device is costly and prohibitive. PoE provides the answer by devivering power via the same Ethernet cable connecting the data to the remote device. The specification for PoE has been defined at various levels of power by the IEEE. The initial standard know as IEEE802.3af allowed a maximum of 12.95W to be delivered to the remote device. IEEE802.3at increased this to 25.5W. Recently the new IEEE802.3bt standard pushed this to as much as 100W!

Practical limitations such as cable length (100m), cable gauge and heat dissipation in cable bundles need to be taken into consideration when deploying PoE.

Interface and Isolation

Slew-rate controlled load switches and multi-channel I/O expanders simplify and reduce component count, system size and power consumption. Slew-rate controlled load switches, with extremely low on-resistance, control power to loads in a controlled manner for improved reliability and power saving. General purpose low-voltage, I/O Expanders are designed for micro-controllers requiring additional I/Os ensuring that additional interconnections are kept to a minimum.

DC to DC Convertors

DC-DC Converters include Buck, boost and mixed function products, all designed to reduce size, improve efficiency and improve system performance.

Wireless Power

Wireless power has arrived. Consumer lifestyle and the need for more robust handheld industrial and medical devices has driven wireless power solutions. Kinetic’s single chip wireless power receiver solution is compliant to Qi/WPC v1.2.4 and features a peak efficiency of 97% with minimal parts count.