Infineon Solutions Make Your Applications More Sustainable

Hello everybody! My name is Prasanna Obala Bhuvanesh. I am a lead hardware engineer with Infineon Technologies Power Management and Mulitmarket division. I've been in the semiconductor industry for over 12 years working anywhere from product definition to IC design and predominantly in power management circuits. So today we're going to look at little bit about Global Warming and how Infineon products are placed to address it.

So what is Global Warming? Global Warming is warming of the globe. And what are its effects? Its effects range anywhere from melting of the polar ice sheets, the glaciers, the sea levels rise, average precipitation increase across the world, more frequent flood, droughts and many more. So what is causing Global Warming? Data from Bloomberg clearly shows the rise in temperature from 1880 and onwards. And we can see that over the last 75 years, the temperature has risen by almost a degree. And this is inline with the emission of the Greenhouse Gasses such as carbon dioxide. So where are these Greenhouse Gasses coming from? The data from the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States taken from 2014, shows the breakup. 12% from consumer and residential, which is basically the appliances that we use at our house the lighting, the chargers, the adapters, the computers. 21% from industry which is basically used for powering the industrial buildings and factories. Transportation 26%, half of which comes from passenger cars and vehicles. Agriculture 9%, comes from the fertilization techniques that's used. And electricity, 30%. Electricity here refers to the power generation, distribution, transmission.

Greenhouse Gasses such as carbon dioxide. So where are these Greenhouse Gasses coming from? The data from the Environmental Protection Agency of the United States taken from 2014, shows the breakup. 12% from consumer and residential, which is basically the appliances that we use at our house the lighting, the chargers, the adapters, the computers. 21% from industry which is basically used for powering the industrial buildings and factories. Transportation 26%, half of which comes from passenger cars and vehicles. Agriculture 9%, comes from the fertilization techniques that's used. And electricity, 30%. Electricity here refers to the power generation, distribution, transmission.

So although these products are striving for efficiency, they are often handicapped by the limitations of the building blocks that are fundamental to the power conversion and management in these products. So to understand this a little more, let's go into the journey of the electric power. Power is generated at a power plant, it gets transmitted through the transmission lines over long distance, and then once it reaches our neighborhood, it gets distributed to our houses. It comes in the form of AC which then needs to be converted into DC power which is applicable and usable to the final device.

Now in this case we see lighting application. So anywhere between the AC outlet and the DC needs of the final application, there's usually a power conversion that's needed. And that circuit that you see is an example of this. So in the circuit you can see the many building blocks that actually contribute to this conversion. And the fundamental blocks here are the switches, like the MOSFET's.

For example the OptiMos, the CoolMos and the StrongIRFET's from the Infineon family. The EiceDrivers, the PWM controllers. These all need to be delivering best in class performance in order for the final product to achieve its overall best efficiency. When I say best in class, what am I talking about? Let's take the MOSFET for example. Best in class for MOSFET is defined by its figure of merit.

So in the MOSFET, we have two types of losses. One is the conduction loss that arises because of the resistance between the drain and the source – it's called Rds(on). And the switching loss that arises because of the gate capacitance that's needed to be charged and discharged. The product of the Rds(on) and the gate capacitance QG forms the figure of merit. And the lower the figure of merit, the more lost less the device is. So we saw how the best in class needs for these products translate into the overall efficiency of the product. So, coming back to the journey map here, where do Infineon's products apply to this journey? They pretty much apply all throughout the journey

So it starts from power generation, for example, solar and wind power. Then it goes through all the way in transmission for example in the smart grid. And in applications ranging anywhere from consumer, industrial, automotive, medical, you name it. The key thing here is not just in the utilization of power for efficiency. It's about how we utilize power to get the best efficiency. How we utilize power in an intelligent way to enhance the efficiency, and how we utilize power in a secure way.

So, we saw how the basic building blocks like the CoolMos OptiMos deliver the best in class from a technology standpoint. Now from an intelligence standpoint, we have sensors and micro-controllers like the XMC family which deliver to the intelligent needs of saving power. And for security, we see the needs to have all our interconnected devices which are basically talking to each other now through infrastructures like the IoT, to be more secure.

And, with Infineon's products, like the OREGA or the OPTIGA or the trusted platform modules we address that too. So next time you think of power, efficiency, intelligence and security, you're thinking Green and you think Infineon.

Thank you.