Electric power management in electronic products Introduction

Increasingly, electronics designers are having to deal with the pragmatic management of electrical energy on a printed circuit board, or even within an integrated circuit. The linear voltage regulator (even with low voltage drop) is increasingly used to attenuate noise superimposed on a continuous voltage level, and less and less to adapt the voltage level itself. The switch-mode voltage converter, or DC/DC converter, is widely used by engineers with no direct links to the power electronics community. On the other hand, the power electronics community is interested in the behavior of converters at low power or even very low power scales. The principles of power electronics can even be applied to the problem of recovering ambient energy for the micro-generation of electricity. So there's a wide range of applications where the two communities can meet and share knowledge.

In simple terms, an electronics engineer is used to thinking in terms of fairly low-level electronic functions, and a switching converter can be seen as a particular non-linear function. A power electronics engineer, on the other hand, reacts on the basis of major conversion principles, which are ultimately translated into hardware implementation. The two approaches are complementary, and the Techniques de l'Ingénieur collection dedicated to power electronics aims to detail some of the main principles of power electronics that the electronics engineer can take advantage of when choosing a conversion architecture or designing a converter.

The concepts presented in this general introduction form a kind of syllabus around DC-DC converters, mainly from a low-power perspective.

Techniques de l'Ingénieur's "power electronics: conversion and management" collection is made up of a number of fairly distinct sections, covering the most useful general principles for DC/DC converters. They cover the elements needed to understand the main functions of power electronics, providing concrete answers to the questions a user or designer needs to ask, based on a real-life problem. Power electronics semiconductor components, whose performance is often a decisive factor in structural choices, are also presented. Future prospects in this field, from an essentially scientific angle, are detailed. A succession of concrete applications reflect the main problems encountered today (safety, servo-control, technological choices, etc.).

This introductory article is divided into four sections:

• the concept of switching power conversion, illustrated by a number of problems;

• the main switching converter topologies, covered in ;

• a simple example illustrating how developments...