APEC 2023

APEC (Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition) was back in full effect this year (2023) after a couple lighter years of attendance due to COVID and was hosted in Orlando, Florida. There was positive energy and welcoming weather at the show.

The primary message at the show was efficient usage of power, which can lead us to more energy sustainability. Technologies showing efficiency gains like SiC and GaN were commonplace. Applications for traction inverters in transportation got significant seminar time, though there was just as much push on the exhibition floor for efficient power supplies in industrial automation, data centers, RF applications, and USB-C chargers.

A secondary topic that was popping up in technical sessions and upcoming products was the telemetry and communication protocol PMBus. Although PMBus has been around for about 15 years, there are continued improvements being made. PMBus 1.5 includes standards for security and authentication. Eval boards from Analog Devices and Texas Instruments include PMBus and show precision resolution in the single milli-volts range.

Analog Devices was showing off a range of products, including upgrades to the AD9625. Just looking at the size difference between the old and new board starts to tell the story of efficiency improvements and cost reduction. The AD9625 is focused on RF power with low noise output. It’s a power supply that could be used with Transceivers, ADCs, and DACs that require high resolution and low noise in the signal chain. Traditionally the noise reduction in these stages was achieved by LC filtering and low-noise LDOs to reduce the noise level. The extra filtering and discrete components have been removed on the new version of the board that has implemented the Silent Switcher technology. The result of these improvements is in the ballpark of a 30% power loss reduction.

EPC was showing off the gains in Gen 6 GaN versus Silicon. The demo showed the MOSFET FDMS2D5N08C and the eval board EPC90153. It ran two almost identical half-bridge development boards from EPC. It ran between 24 to 48 V at 500 kHz. The GaN based solution in these conditions showed 20 degrees lower temperature despite having a higher R_DSON. The GaN based solution also has a much smaller die size.

It is exciting and reassuring that power electronics continue to shrink and that efficiency continues to be a priority across factory automation, power generation, data centers, wireless, and consumer electronics. It was a great show. I am grateful to be part of the DigiKey team in attendance.