New Industry Products

Phihong USA Selects Power Integrations ICs in Design of Linear-Eliminator Adapters

October 31, 2006 by Jeff Shepard

Phihong USA and Power Integrations, Inc. (PI) announced that Phihong has selected PI's LinkSwitch®-LP family of integrated circuits with EcoSmart® technology in the design of its PLA family of linear-eliminator adapters. The PLA family addresses sub-12W applications such as cellphones and wireless phones, MP3 players and PDAs. Phihong PLA charger/adapters with PI's LinkSwitch-LP ICs easily meet worldwide regulatory standards for energy efficiency and deliver up to 3W of output power in a compact, cost-effective design.

"Using PI's LinkSwitch-LP has enabled us to design our PLA family of adapters with a the small footprint, no-load consumption of less than 0.3W at 230Vac and a low leakage current of 250uA. We plan to use PI ICs in the design of our 1, 2 and 3W PLA family of linear replacement adapters," said Michael Mueller, Vice-President of Sales, Phihong USA.

"Energy-efficiency standards practically eliminate the use of linear-regulated external power supplies in key markets such as California, making it necessary for OEM suppliers to move to new power supply solutions in the immediate future," noted Doug Bailey, Vice President of Marketing, Power Integrations. "Phihong has addressed the needs of the OEMs with its new PLA family of adapters. These new adapters are CEC and ENERGY STAR compliant and offer OEMs a low-cost power supply solution for personal electronics."

Phihong PLA external charger/adapters provide single outputs from 3 to 12V, and outputs ranging from 1 to 3W in a significantly smaller package size than many linear power supplies. In addition, each model meets all voluntary and mandatory environmental regulations for no-load current drain and efficiency. The PLA series are priced from $3.38 for most 1W models to $3.98 for 3W models in quantities of 1000. They are available in sample quantities from Phihong distributors.

LinkSwitch-LP features a 700V power MOSFET integrated with control and fault protection circuitry on a single silicon chip. The ICs operate across the universal input range of 85 to 265Vac and achieve an extremely low no-load power consumption of less than 150mW at 265 Vac. The simple ON/OFF control scheme of LinkSwitch-LP provides constant efficiency even at light loads, enabling easy compliance with recent efficiency standards. The new product family is also supported by a reference design kit, the DAK-85, which includes a fully tested 6V, 330mA charger, an engineering test report and product samples.