TTI MarketEYE Articles

How Engineering-Led VA/VE and Function Analysis Bosst Value in Electronics by Adam Kimmel on 12/07/2022 
Engineering-led value analysis (VA) and value engineering (VE) optimize product value through product-based cost savings and will be important tools companies utilize to reduce the costs of components containing semiconductors in the future.

How Sensors Improve Battery Performance, Enhance Sustainability and Extend Lifetime by Adam Kimmel on 09/26/2022
Several new trends and innovations expand the possibilities of today’s sensor technology – the lifeblood of the IoT – resulting in improved battery performance and longer lifetimes.

Optimizing Battery Life and Performance: Battery Chemistry and Hardware Innovation by Adam Kimmel on 06/02/2022
Optimizing battery management system (BMS) functionality in EV technology will lead to longer battery lives, increased efficiency, lower system costs and enhanced overall performance.

How Digital Twins Optimize the Smart Manufacturing Value Chain by Adam Kimmel on 04/04/2022
Digital twins – avatars that can simulate decisions and actions in a virtual world – can improve product development and launch phases in smart manufacturing, saving valuable time and money while protecting your brand’s reputation.

How MEMS Sensors Deliver Rapid Automotive Efficiency Improvement by Adam Kimmel on 03/24/2022
With worldwide energy demand and greenhouse gas emissions increasing, but mainstream EV use still years away, MEMS sensor technology can help OEMs improve fuel economy and comply with emissions regulations.

Battery Elimination Through Energy Harvesting in Ultra-Low-Power MCUs by Adam Kimmel on 03/09/2022
Energy harvesting offers a new way to gain efficiency in wireless sensors, wearables and other edge applications. Adam Kimmel presents an innovative approach to reducing power consumption in devices with ultra-low-power MCUs.

How Will Autonomous Technology Reshape the Electric Vehicle Landscape? by Adam Kimmel on 02/03/2022
Beyond simple efficiency, there are a host of safety and other factors that make autonomous vehicle technology attractive to electric vehicle manufacturers. Adam Kimmel details how these factors can propel both EV and AV technology development in the years ahead.

Modular and Mobile: Trends in Protective Housing Selection by John Sandy on 11/17/2021
GPS navigation and monitoring systems on agricultural vehicles have to survive constant dirt and dust, and both summer sun and pouring rain. The electronics that control photovoltaic panels have to survive the same solar rays that produce the energy. 

How Will Autonomous Technology Reshape the Electric Vehicle Landscape on 02/03/2022
Beyond simple efficiency, there are a host of safety and other factors that make autonomous vehicle technology attractive to electric vehicle manufacturers. Adam Kimmel details how these factors can propel both EV and AV technology development in the years ahead.

White Papers

How to Select the Right Circuit Protection by Carling Technologies
Circuit breakers are everywhere. If a technology, product, or piece of equipment runs on electricity, chances are it contains at least one circuit breaker to keep users and internal components safe.

Safe power supplies in the process industry: Certification, redundancy, and functional safety by Phoenix Contact
Permanent system availability and high operational safety are of paramount importance in the process industries. Stringent requirements are placed on the security of power supplies where power failure of the process system could result in incidents endangering people and the environment, increased costs, and more. The failure of even just one controller in a refinery can cause major damage, which is why the devices used must be especially safe.

Maximize Your Uptime: Reducing Risk of Power Supply Failure by Phoenix Contact
Low-power electrical transients generated within a facility are the primary cause of failure to AC/DC power supplies. These transients reduce the life of power supplies and create unplanned downtime. This document will explain why these transients cause failure and outline how placing high-power transient voltage surge suppression (TVSS) devices in front of the power supplies will increase the life and uptime of the power supplies. 

The Development of New Amorphous Cores for High Frequency Power Applications by Bourns
Increased electrification is driving the development of more efficient energy solutions for all market segments. Designers of semiconductor technology have developed new methods for switching such as soft switching or zero current switching, which have contributed to increased bandwidth and the introduction of devices using GaN and SiC materials. 

Inverter Output AC Filter Capacitor for Today's Demanding Applications  by CDE
Many of today's inverter circuits require highly reliable and rugged capacitors to filter out the rich harmonic content of their AC output waveforms. The current of the harmonics at the output of inverter circuits is often greater than the current at the fundamental frequency. 

Deriving Life Multipliers for Electrolytic Capacitors  by CDE
Aluminum electrolytic capacitors are routinely used as input bus capacitors in the power supply sections of electronic equipment such as motor drives, UPS systems, and welders. Most of these capacitors fail eventually from wearout. This article offers a brief explanation of how capacitor manufacturers quantify the effects of applied voltage, ripple current, frequency, ambient temperature, and airflow on capacitor life.

Segmented Film Capacitor Technical Paper by CDE
Uninterruptable Power Supplies (UPS) have become a necessity for any system or data that can be lost, damaged or impaired by an unexpected power failure. Common backup power applications range from medical instruments to computing servers and data centers. Even the common home computer may be backed up by such a power supply.

Selecting & Applying Aluminum Electrolytic Capacitors for Inverter Applications  by CDE
One of the main application classes of aluminum electrolytic capacitors is input capacitors for power inverters. The aluminum electrolytic capacitor provides a unique value in high energy storage and low device impedance. How you go about selecting the right capacitor or capacitors, however, is not a trivial matter. 

Solid Polymer Aluminum Capacitor Chips in DC-DC Converter Modules by CDE
The new, 125 °C, solid polymer aluminum (SPA) capacitors have performance advantages over other types of low ESR capacitors when used as output filters in DC-DC modules. The principal advantage of an SPA capacitor is that its ultra low ESR permits filtering in a DC-DC converter with fewer capacitors. 

Design of Snubbers for Power Circuits by CDE
Power semiconductors are the heart of power electronics equipment. Snubbers are circuits which are placed across semiconductor devices for protection and to improve performance. Snubbers can do many things.

Designing for AC circuits requires thinking differently about MLCC choices by Kemet
The 20th Century, Edison and Tesla, known bitter rivals, battled for years to see whose power delivery technology would thrive in the Electrical Age. Edison, the self-taught, self-made titan of industry was already revered for his invention of the lightbulb; one that would ultimately go on to be the light to the darkest parts of the Northeast United States. Tesla was the foreign, brilliant scientist with an extensive education and an ability to understand some of the most esoteric topics of electromagnetics. Tesla previously worked for Edison in Menlo Park. The two had a difference of opinion and work ethic, resulting in their working relationship ultimately sour to a bitter rivalry.

Taking on the Challenge of Managing Power Through Connector Design by Molex
Today, across the world, there are nearly 90 million internet transactions conducted per minute, or 1.5 million occurrences each second. All of these emails, app downloads, video streams, social media interactions, retail purchases and more are processed through a network of worldwide data centers. These data centers contain upwards of 10,000 servers supported by a network on switches, routers and cooling equipment—all of which rely on an increasing amount of electricity

Emerging UPS standby power sources by Eaton
Though an uninterruptible power supply (UPS) performs many important functions, most users value them chiefly for the emergency energy they provide during a power outage. UPSs give IT personnel the time they need to protect sensitive equipment and data from the effects of an electrical service interruption by starting a backup generator, shutting down systems in an orderly fashion, or moving data and processing to a disaster recovery site.

Supplying the World - What to consider when designing a power supply by TDK
Most OEMs see exporting as a key opportunity for growth and profit, but they're also keen to minimise the number of different versions of their products that they have to produce in order to address the needs of world markets. Fortunately, designing a power supply, which will sit almost every country of the world without modification, doesn't have to be difficult. Bob Taylor of TDK-Lambda UK explains.

Additional Resources

Advancing Artificial Intellifence: YAGEO's Role in Powering the AI Revolutions by Philip Lessner, Ph. D, YAGEO Artificial Intelligence (AI) has taken the world by storm, transforming various industries such as Industry 4.0, Smart Farming, healthcare, and finance, to name a few. AI is revolutionizing how we interact with technology; from language translation to autonomous vehicles, it is rapidly becoming an integral part of our daily lives.

Protect Your Building and Home with Littelfuse Components for Surge Protective Devices (SPDs) by Littelfuse With intelligent devices propagating throughout homes and building, surge protection has become very important. Voltage surge sources can include lightning, induced power surges, industrial and switching surges, and nuclear electromagnetic pulses.

Using Power MOSFETS in Parallel by Nexperia Increasing the capability of a MOSFET switch element by using several individual MOSFETs connected in parallel can be useful. However, when designing switch elements careful consideration of the circuit requirements and the MOSFET characteristics and behavior must be applied.

Plug-in Solutions for Medium & High Voltage Applications by TE  Air is the oldest and still most widely used insulation material in high voltage applications. Since introduction of other insulation including oil and SF6, however, a growing number of HV applications are being integrated into housings filled with these materials. Pluggable cable accessories are a perfect example of this trend and were developed to allow easy connection to such integrated devices while at the same time keeping the device separate from the application itself. This overview, contributed by Robert Ströbl of TE Connectivity, discusses plug-in solutions now being used to connect medium and high voltage apparatus to power cables.

Insulation and Protection Enhancing the Reliability of Overhead Power Systems by TE  TE Energy provides solutions for substations, underground cable, overhead lines, and railway applications. These products have earned a world wide reputation for materials, innovation, quality, service and technical expertise.

Power Management Resistors for Aerospace Applications by TT Electronics High reliability is an absolute necessity in the changing world of civil aviation. Providing safe travel around the world requires cutting-edge electronic solutions that support flight crews in an intuitive manner. This extends from the cockpit to the external flight control system which, until recently, was still primarily dependent on manual interfaces and hydraulic systems. Power resistors have helped aircraft designers overcome this enduring pain point to gradually replace many functions of manual flight controls with high-reliability electronic interfaces.

EATON UPS and power management Fundamentals handbook by Eaton  From plug and receptacle charts and facts about power problems to an overview of various UPS topologies and factors affecting battery life, you’ll find a wealth of pertinent resources designed to help you develop the optimum solution. 

What Ceramic Technologies Are Best for High Power Density Applications? | Part 1  by Kemet The amount of data we’re generating today is mind-blowing. In the last couple of years 90 percent of the data in the world was generated, and we’re creating over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data every day. This means that there will be 40x more bytes of data than there are stars in the observable universe by 2020! All this data relies on electrical power. And, the internet of things, and adoption of hybrid-electric vehicles is only going to accelerate this demand.

What Ceramic Technologies Are Best for High Power Density Applications? | Part 2  By Kemet In part 1 of the blog we reviewed the characteristics of Class I and Class II multilayer ceramic capacitors (MLCCs) to determine which provided the best performance for high power density applications including snubbers, DC-LINK and resonant converters.

DC-Link Design Tips by Kemet DC-Link capacitors form an essential stage in power conversion for many applications, including three-phase Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) inverters, photovoltaic and wind power inverters, industrial motor drives, automotive onboard chargers and inverters (Figure 1), medical equipment power supplies, etc. Demanding applications possess cost, harsh environmental, and stringent reliability constraints. Although circuit designs can use different approaches, the long-standing core of power conversion designs includes DC-Link capacitors. DC-Link capacitors can improve system energy density and resolve the physical challenges of ripples introduced by rapid switching that is inherent to switching power conversions. But what type of capacitors work well as DC-Links, and why?

The Benefit of Using a Three Sense Pin Design on Battery / Meter Shunt Resistors by Vishay The low values of battery shunts being produced today necessitate the use of precision analog to digital converters (ADCs) to interpret the voltage drop across the shunt’s element. Many of these precision ADCs require the sense pins to be within a certain voltage range of the ADC’s analog ground reference input. Ground reference is dependent on configuration (high side vs low side) and may not be the actual circuit or chassis “ground.” An ideal sense circuit has high impedance inputs to limit current flow. Current flow within the sense circuit causes voltage drops that will affect the voltage reading of the ADC. The best way to achieve an ideal circuit configuration is through the use of an additional pin connected to the ground side of the battery shunt, outside of the main sensing circuit. This design allows for a very low voltage differential between the ADC analog ground reference and the sense pin ground, and limits the current flow through the actual sense circuit.