How low can you go? Driving down standby power in next-generation adaptors

May 30, 2012 // By Grant Floyd

From the charging of a tablet PC or smartphone battery to powering a laptop computer or home router, power adaptors have established themselves an essential part of everyday life.

For the consumer electronics OEMs that bundle these adaptors with their products there are two key driving factors that need to be addressed. These are ensuring high efficiency levels, meeting safety regulations and simultaneously having a compact form factor. In recent times, thanks to a combination of government legislation and energy efficiency programs such as Energy Star, the European Ecodesign Directive and the China Standard Certification Center (CSC), there has been a major focus on further driving down adaptors' overall power consumption levels by minimizing the amount of energy used while in standby mode. The following article looks at the technology trends emerging which are enabling the latest requirements to be addressed, including new processes that reduce the number of external components utilized - leading to sleeker, more lightweight designs.

Read the full article on page 22 of our May digital edition.

Technical papers     

• Lighting Applications – Lighting the Way with LEDs
• Risk Mitigation for Powering Low Voltage Processors & FPGAs Directly from Intermediate Bus Voltage
• Haswell - the 4th Generation Intel@ Core ™ Processor Platform
• 60V Buck-Boost Controller Drives High Power LEDs

December 15, 2011 | Texas instruments | 222901974

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