Inefficient power supplies have higher internal power dissipation, which directly translates into heat. Removing this unwanted heat adds cost, increases size, lowers reliability, and reduces the overall performance of the electronic system.
In fact, as systems become more powerful and compact, effective thermal management of electronics has become a continuous challenge for engineers across nearly every industry. While there are many solutions for removing heat from hot power components and packages—such as fans, liquid cooling, heat sinks, and similar methods—there are also significant advances being made within the products themselves to improve a system’s thermal performance, reducing the need for external thermal management requirements.
Advancing Thermal Management Solutions
Although heat-sinking technologies have advanced in recent years through improved materials and innovative design techniques, they remain relatively bulky components that increase the size and weight of the power supply and add cost to the bill of materials. In addition, if the system requires forced-air cooling as part of the thermal management solution, the power system becomes even larger and overall reliability decreases. Thus, eliminating heat sinks from a power supply can be highly beneficial. System designers must either adopt a design that reduces wasted heat by increasing the unit’s efficiency or implement a design that removes heat more effectively. For example, some power supplies use the housing as part of the thermal solution, allowing the elimination of separate heat sinks.
However, avoiding heat generation is the more effective approach for both AC/DC and DC/DC converters, and maintaining high efficiency across the entire load range has become critical for all types of electronic products. Consider an 800W supply operating at 90% efficiency: the 10% loss produces around 80W of heat, which must be managed using proper materials and thermal design to ensure components on the printed circuit board (PCB) do not exceed prescribed operating temperatures, preventing potential failures.
By improving the efficiency of such supplies from 90% to 95%, the power dissipation is reduced by 50% (from 80W to 40W), making the associated heat generation far easier to manage within a power converter system. Hence, selecting an efficient supply is essential. Using a higher-efficiency design that maintains strong performance across all loads reduces heat dissipation, simplifies thermal management, and eliminates the need for airflow-based cooling or dedicated heat sinks.
Maximizing Power Density and Efficiency in DC/DC Converters
RECOM offers compact, cost-effective, and highly efficient
AC/DC power supplies,
DC/DC converters, and
switching regulators for a wide range of applications. Efficiency is often a crucial factor when selecting the most suitable component, especially for a PCB-mounted converter module where power density can be very high.
To support these applications, RECOM engineers have developed high-efficiency power supplies that combine the latest architecture with innovative topology, advanced
3D power packaging® (3DPP®), optimized components, and refined thermal management solutions. These technologies deliver maximum efficiency, high power density, flexibility, and strong reliability. With 3DPP, RECOM reduces two critical parameters, Ψjt and θja, which define the overall multi-path thermal resistance of a power package or component, helping narrow the operating temperature of the thermal source and the case temperature (Figure 1).
