Preview: Darnell to Release Fifth-Edition Digital Power Analysis
Darnell Group, the pioneer in analyzing the markets for digital power will be releasing its fifth-edition report on "Trends in Digital Power Electronics" next week. The digital power conversion market will experience substantial growth over the next several years as users demand more advanced features and functions in their products. This growth will be led by a surge in 2014 and settle down into a pattern of rapid growth for the next five years. Driven by growth across a number of sectors including communications, computers, solid-state lighting and a growing smart grid/energy management segment, the combined external ac-dc, embedded ac-dc and dc-dc converter modules markets will reach nearly $10 billion dollars in 2019.
The value of digital power has always been the functions it can provide, and that functionality has become more defined and focused over the past several years as users demand a number of specific features and operations such as auto-compensation, PMBus capabilities, loop control, monitoring and reporting, parameter setting, OTP memory capability, etc. Although these features and functions vary by industry, there are a number of common requirements identified. Among these, auto-compensation was cited as one of the of the more desired features of digital power as it eliminates a substantial burden from the power supply design and results in a more robust power supply for the life of the power supply.
Applications have already been identified that favor digital control, and products have been developed that meet those requirements or offer certain features that are critical to updated system designs. These are the so-called “legacy†applications for digital power management and control. They are large markets that will keep the traditional distributed power architectures in use for many years, with many of them incorporating digital control at some level. In contrast, new power architectures identified in this report incorporate digital power right from the beginning, and that makes them different from the legacy architectures.
Over 35 tables and graphs are presented in this report covering the external ac-dc power supply market, the embedded ac-dc power supply market and the dc-dc converter module power supply market. The report only looks at the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) market. The focus of this comprehensive analysis will be to provide decision makers with a detailed and insightful look at the current and future opportunities available in the digital power supply market. Complete details of this in-depth analysis of digital power electronics will be released next week.
