SFBAC PELS Presents - Optimizing Custom Magnetics for High-Performance Power Supplies

The SFBAC (combined Santa Clara Valley, San Francisco, & Oakland/East Bay) IEEE Power Electronics Society (PELS) is very pleased to invite you to our April chapter meeting. We are excited and honored to have Michael D. Seeman, Ph.D., President and Founder, Eta One Power, Inc., to speak on the topic of “Optimizing Custom Magnetics for High-Performance Power Supplies” in regard to simplifying the magnetics design process (and power supply overall design), while maintaining accuracy, in a very pragmatic way for every day designers.  Additional event details can be found below.

THIS TALK IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE IEEE MAGNETICS SOCIETY (http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/mag/)

THIS TALK IS CO-SPONSORED BY THE IEEE POWER & ENERGY / INDUSTRY APPS SOCIETIES (http://power.ieeesiliconvalley.org/)

Registration will be $5 at the door with no exceptions (unless you register with an .edu or ti.com email).  You can register ahead of time without paying, but ALL ATTENDEES (except students/TI employees) will be expected to pay at the door.

PELS WEBSITE LINK: http://ewh.ieee.org/r6/scv/pels/index.html

Talk Title:

Optimizing Custom Magnetics for High-Performance Power Supplies

Abstract:

Power supply design and performance often revolve around the magnetic components. Only the simplest converters can use off-the-shelf inductors; most isolated and high voltage power converters must rely on custom inductors as each application has a unique requirement. Designers of power supplies must also be experts in magnetics, not just in circuits and controls.
Designers must consider winding DC resistance, core, proximity and fringing effect losses when designing their magnetics in the context of their specific power converter. This analysis is often abbreviated: core losses are taken using sinusoidal approximations to the waveform, and proximity and fringing effects are often neglected. Thus, engineers cannot adequately understand how the magnetics can be improved when considering these complex losses, and must iterate their inductor and transformer designs, increasing cost and time-to-market.
This talk will discuss the tradeoffs in power converter and magnetics design, with the goal of improving efficiency and power density. The discussion will utilize a new software tool for analyzing power converters with a unified approach, simultaneously analyzing circuits and devices, control stability, and magnetics performance. The software tools enable quick circuit and magnetics simulation with numerous integrated capabilities including efficiency calculations and loop stability analysis.
The principles and techniques discussed in the talk will be validated through the simulation and analysis of a 65W offline valley-switch-mode flyback converter. The losses of the converter will be analyzed in depth and compared with the accurate results created from the new analysis tool.

About the speaker:

Michael D. Seeman, Ph.D., President and Founder, Eta One Power, Inc.

Dr. Michael Seeman is the President and Founder of Eta One Power, an engineering software startup company. Eta One Power is the company behind Eta Designer, the first simulation and analysis software that focuses on increasing power density and efficiency of power supplies. His focus is on the analysis and computational optimization of tradeoffs in power converter design.
He was formerly the Systems and Applications Engineering Manager in the Gallium Nitride Products Group at Texas Instruments. He has significant experience in cutting-edge power conversion solutions using wide-bandgap technologies, resonant converter architectures and modern magnetics structures. He previously worked in two Silicon Valley startups in the power electronics space.
Michael received his S.B. degree from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from UC Berkeley. He is a member of the IEEE and the vice-chair for the SF Bay Area Chapter of PELS.