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Darnell Debuts New Trends in Power Distribution Report

November 18, 2003 by Jeff Shepard

Darnell Group Inc. (Corona, CA) announced publications of its new Trends in Power Distribution: Global Market Forecasts, Power System Architectures and Demand Characteristics, Fourth Edition. The 300-page report provides a comprehensive analysis of distributed power architecture (DPA) market characteristics and trends. Included are discussions of the economic factors affecting the market; changing business models; trends in system bus architectures, including a detailed analysis of the IBA; and technical challenges, including packaging, thermal issues, transient response, hot-plug and hot-swapability, and ac/dc front ends.

Distributed power architectures are displacing centralized power architectures worldwide, but at a slower pace than originally thought. According to the 2003 Demand Characteristics Survey included in the report, engineers expect today’s centralized architectures to be replaced with DPAs, spot-power architectures and intermediate bus architectures within the next five years. This is more likely to happen as the cost of dc/dc converters has been reduced and the reliability of ac/dc power supplies has increased. The power supply market today is equally dominated by centralized and traditional distributed power systems.

The DPA market is composed of ac/dc front ends and dc/dc converters. Over 100 tables give dollar and unit forecasts for both these markets by DPA versus non-DPA, merchant versus captive, wattage, applications, and standard versus custom. Additional dc/dc converter forecasts are given by architecture and package style. Pricing forecasts are included for wattage and application segments. All forecasts are broken down by Worldwide, North America, Europe and Asia regions.

The Demand Characteristics survey gives the results to over 30 questions on product/system specifications and demand characteristics for various forms of DPAs. A comparison with the 1997 survey is presented, as well. Finally, over 25 companies in the DPA market are profiled, including both power supply and semiconductor manufacturers. Estimated market share is provided, along with a discussion of the business factors expected to drive the industry forward.