Driven by Density, Efficiency at Low Cost, Power Integration Reaches New Heights: PSiPs and PwrSoCs are growing faster than the traditional power supplies
Ashok Bindra
Abstract
For decades, miniaturization has been the trend in the power supply world. Consumers have been demanding more functions from smaller systems with better performance and reliability at lower cost. Such advances are evident in today’s laptops, tablets, smartphones, industrial drives and a host of other consumer and industrial applications. To meet these demands, the power supply industry has also kept pace with the needs of the markets. As a result, power integration, both in package and on-chip, has continued to evolve for more than a decade. Consequently, with this evolution, power density has risen from tens of watts to hundreds of watts from compact semiconductor packages with high performance in efficiency, density, reliability and other such metrics. On-chip, we are talking about tens of watts delivered from monolithic semiconductor substrates.