News

Program Announced for Second International Power Supply on Chip Workshop

September 15, 2010 by Jeff Shepard

Hosted by Tyndall National Institute, one of Europe’s leading research centers, the 2010 International Power Supply on Chip Workshop (PwrSOC ’10) will take place in Cork, Ireland, 13-15 October. This unique international event will bring together the key players from both the industry and academic communities active in the emerging area of system-in-package (SiP) and system-on-chip (SoC) solutions for power supply miniaturization. The program will address all the areas needed for the commercialization of these advanced, high-performance power conversion technologies including:

– System Architectures Compatible with PwrSoC

– Semiconductor Technologies and Devices to Enable PwrSoC

– Integrated Magnetics and Capacitors

– Converter Topologies and Control Systems for PwrSoC

– Monolithic Integration versus System in Package Considerations

A Plenary talk on, "Power on Silicon with on-die magnetics: The start of a revolution in power delivery and power management for SoC’s and high performance applications," by Ted DiBene, of Intel Corp. will set the stage for the discussions during the following 3 days of the workshop.

Tyndall’s Dr. Cian Ó Mathúna, the founder of the workshop concept, put the value of the workshop in context: "this concept of integrated power solutions presents a significant disruptive opportunity in power management solutions and warrants an international forum for its discussion and for the elucidation of the key challenges that lie ahead".

A major challenge to the further miniaturization of dc-dc converters is the inability to integrate passive components on silicon due to their relatively large size at today’s operating frequencies of 0.5 to 5 MHz. Increasing the switching frequencies into the 10 to 100 MHz region offers the potential for the reduction of passive component values to the point where, with the right technology, their size becomes compatible with silicon device dimensions.

Currently, significant R&D and product development activity is evident in advances in semiconductor, magnetic, capacitor and packaging material technologies that will deliver products operating at multi-MHz frequencies. The ultimate target is to develop new miniaturized product formats that can be referred to as power supply-in-package (PSiP) and power supply-on-chip (PwrSoC). This space has been under increasing focus from semiconductor companies due to their ability to deliver advanced silicon processing technologies and functional integration with increased reliability.

Dr. Ó Mathúna stated "with technical co-sponsored from IEEE Power Electronics Society; PSMA, the Power Sources Manufacturers Association and the European Centre for Power Electronics, we are seeing a very significant level of interest in the workshop. We are anticipating over 100 attendees from US, Europe and Asia with a 50:50 split between industry and academia demonstrating the commercial interest in this emerging technology space. We are delighted to have presentations from key industry players including Analog Devices, Enpirion, Intel, National Semiconductor, NXP and Texas Instruments many of which are presented by senior executives of the companies".

Linnea Bush, Senior Analyst with Darnel commented: "PwrSOC ’10 is the only international technical workshop dedicated to advancing these important leading-edge power conversion technologies. The leadership and initiative of Dr. Ó Mathúna and his team at Tyndall in this space is timely and is to be applauded".

The workshop program and registration details can be found at.