new 30MHz to 300MHz switcher - worlds smallest laptop adapter

[Jasen Betts]

I know you can send data that way (because it can be encoded with just
edges, and providing there isn't too much common mode noise, the edges
can be decoded) but I can't see any way to transfer *power* that way.

use a higher frequency.

_ _ _ .........
/ \_/ \_/ \ --||--:~ +:--
_ _ : -|>|- :
\_/ \_/ \_/ --||--:~ -:--
:.......:

Inductive components are needed if you want isolation - as in most
consumer appliances.

It's usually more practical to do it that way.
there's rules about the size and type of capacitors
that are allowed accross an isolation barrier.

LED lamps don't need isolation and there is a huge amount of work
being done in that area.

Yes, it's the same for any other double-insulated appliance.

 

[[email protected]]

Without patents it wouldn't make sense to do all that work--make all
that investment--only to have it ripped off the nanosecond you ship.

A patent makes it even easier... People's Shining Switching Power Supply
Factories 1 through 37 can start working on it as soon as they can get a
copy of the patent! For an extra penny per unit, PSSPSF will even use
the good fake UL marking, rather than the standard one they did in
Microsoft Paint.

Matt Roberds

 

[[email protected]]

A patent makes it even easier... People's Shining Switching Power Supply

Factories 1 through 37 can start working on it as soon as they can get a
copy of the patent! For an extra penny per unit, PSSPSF will even use
the good fake UL marking, rather than the standard one they did in
Microsoft Paint.

True, but you can sue. That's all a patent really boils down to--
the right to sue someone for copying your <gadget>.

Trade secrets are better, if possible. But much hardware--esp. a
topology, like this--is so easily reverse-engineered, that trade
secrets are useless.

Cheers,
James Arthur

 

[Greegor]

This was promoted as having a size
advantage but has no line isolation that
would pass safety standards.

One hint is that they never mentioned
line isolation which would be an
obvious problem.

By the time they add line isolation
this design won't be so very small,
will it?

 

[[email protected]]

This was promoted as having a size
advantage but has no line isolation that
would pass safety standards.

One hint is that they never mentioned
line isolation which would be an
obvious problem.

By the time they add line isolation
this design won't be so very small,
will it?

Dunno. Inserting a transformer after the switched-cap
stage would do it. At many MHz it could be pretty small.
Crudely suggested below, Fig. X.

========
FIG. 6 (from patent)
========
|<------- Charge pump --------->| . |<--- Synch. Buck --->|
(~1MHz) . (5-300MHz)

 

[josephkk]

Agreed--any cap mismatch produces dV(c), making spikey spikes when
switching from series to parallel configuration, same as a
conventional charge-pump.


I haven't bothered with any numbers, but I rather doubt they could
use on-chip caps. The capacitances and voltages needed are too high.
So says my gut, anyhow.

Let's see...if we wanted 60w (input) worth of charge packets at
1MHz at 170VDC input,
c=60W/(.5*v^2*1Mhz)= 4nF for the series string, or 12nF each for
a string of 3, at 57 volts each.

That would be quite a chip.

I would hope to shout. Dang, that would be massive caps on chip. Mebbe
one of our IC design capable persons could enlighten us on the kind of
area needed. These would have to be relatively good quality (for on chip)
caps as well.

?-)

 

[[email protected]]

True, but you can sue.

Let me know how that lawsuit against People's Shining Switching Power
Supply Factories 1 through 37 works out. Step 1: Figure out whom to sue
and which court to do it in...

That's all a patent really boils down to-- the right to sue someone
for copying your <gadget>.

Yeah, I understand why the money people like patents. To me it just
seems like a road to spending a lot of money on activities that do not
tend to make cool new things appear in the world, which seems like a
moderately silly road to take.

Matt Roberds

 

[Greegor]

JA > The picture showed a line-operated
JA > "plug," which suggests they've
JA > got galvanic isolation.

They're taking PRE-ORDERS on their website..
This 65W laptop adapter is to be out in mid 2014.
At CES 2014 in Las Vegas Jan 7-10
Venetian Level 1 Booth #74113
Anybody here going to CES?

FINsix is supposedly based in Menlo Park, CA
ASIC work is to be at: 27 Drydock Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
Venture capital backed.

http://www.finsix.com/products/adapter.html

http://www.finsix.com/company/team.html

(Impressive)

Their other product:

http://www.finsix.com/products/led.html

LED Driver (In Development)

I just hope it's not another vaporware..

 

[Peter]

[email protected] wrote

Yeah, I understand why the money people like patents. To me it just
seems like a road to spending a lot of money on activities that do not
tend to make cool new things appear in the world, which seems like a
moderately silly road to take.

You need to file patents to get VC funding.

The patents can be bogus (prior art, etc) - doesn't matter. Most
patents are worthless. VCs can't tell the difference.

 

[[email protected]]

Realistically, the max easily obtainable is about 1pF/um^2

At 57V? Isolated? Realistically? ;-)

 

[Don Kuenz]

However annoying patents are, these things are always patented, and
have to be. These guys filed in 2009. Without patents it wouldn't
make sense to do all that work--make all that investment--only
to have it ripped off the nanosecond you ship.

There's two schools of thought regarding patents with my energy
extraction clients. One school believes that patents are better than
nothing to protect a new gadget. The other school believes that patents
only reveal the inner workings of a new gadget to pirates. What one
believes seems to hinge on what happened to one's father.

In the former case, the father-in-law of one my clients invented a new
gadget and did not patent it. The inner workings of the gadget got
ripped off soon after it hit the oil field.

In the latter case, the father of one of my clients got ripped off by
pirates who used the father's patent as a blueprint. So the son did not
file a patent on a new invention. Instead the son housed his new gadget
in a virtual vault made of steel.

Black box virtual vaults (that are not always painted black) are common
in the oil field. One client suspected that a black box rented by him
contained little more than a PC. But the "if we detect that you opened
our black box you own it" clause in the rental contract along with a
sky high sticker price kept the enigma intact.

RCA profited mightily from its guerrilla hold on radio patents. So
"General" Sarnoff reckoned that RCA was entitled to own all of the
newfangled television patents too. But an unknown named Philo Farnsworth
invented television first.

That set up a "David versus Goliath" struggle, but instead of a sword
the Goliath named RCA wielded a bunch of off-the-wall patents.
Apparently the "General" thought that, "If you can't dazzle them with
brilliance, baffle them with BS!" Unfortunately this time around Goliath
used its legal might to win by dragging things out in court until
Farnsworth's patents expired.

--
__
__/ \
/ \__/
\__/ Don Kuenz
/ \__
\__/ \
\__/

 

[[email protected]]

57V is right on the edge of processes I'm familiar with, but 1pF/um^2
is a good number. And there are other passivation layers under
experimentation that have both HV _and_ high pF/um^2.

So you can really stack them to 170V at 1pF/um^2?

 

[Artem]

I have no idea what the concept requires, but I regularly work with as

many as 5-layers of metalization on-chip. Perhaps they're using

Silicon Nitride as the dielectric? And XFAB's XDM10 process has 350V

devices.

The IRF has 1200V Gate drivers.IR22141 But I'm not sure that it can work at 300Mhz.

 

[Greegor]

JA > The picture showed a line-operated
JA > "plug," which suggests they've
JA > got galvanic isolation.

G > They're taking PRE-ORDERS on their website..
G > This 65W laptop adapter is to be out in mid 2014.
G > At CES 2014 in Las Vegas Jan 7-10
G > Venetian Level 1 Booth #74113
G > Anybody here going to CES?
G > FINsix is supposedly based in Menlo Park, CA
G > ASIC work is to be at: 27 Drydock Avenue, Boston, MA 02210
G > Venture capital backed.

http://www.finsix.com/products/adapter.html

http://www.finsix.com/company/team.html
G > (Impressive)

Leadership Team
Vanessa Green - Chief Executive Officer
Vanessa is co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of FINsix. Most recently,Vanessa was a business development manager at TECOM Investments (Dubai, UAE) where she led business development and strategy for Enpark, a 1.4M square foot sustainable real estate project and investment vehicle. Vanessa worked with the Monitor Group from 2005 – 2007 and is a board member of Community Water Solutions, a non-profit she co-founded in 2008. In 2011, Vanessawon the Patrick E. McGovern Entrepreneurship Award, and was selected as a Boston Business Journal Innovation All-Stars Rising Star and Forbes 30-under-30 in Energy. Vanessa holds an M.Eng. in Civil and Environmental Engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Sloan School of Management and a B.A. in Environmental Science from Dartmouth College.

Anthony Sagneri - Chief Technology Officer
Tony is co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at FINsix. Prior to starting FINsix, Tony completed a Ph.D. with the RLE/LEES laboratory at MIT in VHFpower. He helped establish the fundamental network principles behind VHF power conversion and designed and built over a dozen high-performance converters. In addition he established and validated device optimization and transformer synthesis techniques enabling higher efficiency and access to a broader applications space. Before MIT, Tony served for five years in the U.S.Air Force, rising to the rank of Captain. As a Mission Operations Commander at DGS-2, Beale AFB, he led a team of 70 intelligence operators to 169 collection missions over a number of locations worldwide. Tony holds a Ph.D. and S.M. in Electrical Engineering from MIT, a BSEE from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and is a graduate of the U.S. Air Force Intelligence OfficerCourse.

Joseph Scarci - VP of Sales and Marketing
Joe is Vice President of Sales and Marketing at FINsix, where he leads all product management, product marketing, marcom, and partnering activities. Prior to FINsix, Joe worked as Vice President of Marketing at SolarBridge Technologies, a microinverter start-up based in Austin, TX. At SolarBridge, Joe was responsible for all marketing and sales activities and led partnering efforts that resulted in six contracts with leading solar panel manufacturers. Prior to SolarBridge, he worked at Schneider Electric/American Power Conversion, Analog Devices, and AT&T, where he held a variety of general management and senior marketing positions. Joe earned both a Bachelor of Science degree in Mechanical Engineering and a Master of Business Administration degree from Carnegie Mellon University.

Jim Kardarch - Director, Technology Integration (Computing)
Jim retired from Intel at the end of 2012 as a Senior Principal Engineer and Chief Power Architect. Jim worked at Intel for 26 years, with 24 years focused on notebook platform architecture and low power technologies. Jim hasover 100 issued patents and has lead development of many industry specifications including ACPI (Advanced Configuration and Power Interface), and a low power radio technology he famously named Bluetooth. Jim is a senior member of IEEE, was an original inductee into the Bluetooth Hall of Fame (2006), and was a runner up in the Discover Magazine Award for Technology Innovation in 1999, has received five Intel Achievement Awards and a gold Intel Environmental award. Jim also does volunteer work with the MESA (Math Engineering Science and Achievement) program for underprivileged students to encourage STEM education for which Jim was awarded the 2012 Santa Clara Site Intel Involved Hero Award and works with the MESA program as part of an EncoreFellowship program. Jim has a BS in Electrical Engineering from CaliforniaState University Fresno (’84) and was recently awarded their “Top Dog” Alumni award for lifetime achievement (Go Dogs!) and was recently featured in the CSU Working in California series for CSU’s 50th anniversary.

Dave Grant - Director, IC Development
Dave is the Director of IC development at FINsix. Prior to FINsix, Dave worked at Texas Instruments for 18 years, holding the title of Distinguished Member of Technical Staff. At Texas Instruments he designed and led the design of many different families of analog and mixed signal ICs, including power controllers, monolithic power converters, LDOs and RF ICs. Prior to Texas Instruments, Dave worked as a system level designer for 11 years, developing video test equipment for Philips, CRT based computer monitors and test hardware for IBM, high end stereo electronics for Linn Products and digitalelectronics for a business computer company. He has 20 issued patents. Dave has a BSc in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from The University ofGlasgow, Scotland, UK.


G > Their other product:

http://www.finsix.com/products/led.html

LED Driver (In Development)

G > I just hope it's not another vaporware..

Jan > So it seems to be resonant after all...:
Jan >

http://www.finsix.com/technology/advantages.html

Technology Advantages

10x Power Density
At VHF switching frequencies, energy is processed more often, so it can be handled in smaller chunks. This means less temporary energy storage so the inductors and capacitors can shrink. Since these energy storage components occupy the bulk of the volume, the direct consequence is reduced converter size—up to 10x—and higher power density.

Amazing Transient Response
Transient response reflects how fast a power converter can adapt to changesin the load or source. FINsix converters are 1,000x faster than today’s technology. This makes life easier for system designers and enables unexpected applications, like best in class dimming and compatibility for LED lamps.

Rugged Reliability
The elimination of heavy components, like magnetic core transformers, enables superior resistance to mechanical shock and vibration. Furthermore, the overall reduction in component count, specifically of through-hole components, means fewer points of failure.

Batch Manufacturing
Since we don’t need discrete inductors or other through-hole components, our power converters can be manufactured in a fully automated surface-mountprocess, ensuring high reliability and repeatability.

Jan > And no efficiencey numbers given, must be really bad.
Jan > Only advantage small size?
Jan > Only 110 V?
Jan > How about RF interference at VHF? with DTV, cellphones?
Jan > Normal switchers are already bad enough,
Jan > I have one radiating 250 kHz.

This would be hard to get past FCC emissions testing right?

Jan > And to say, here:

http://www.finsix.com/products/led.html

"Highest Performance - Blinking,
instability, noise and LED lamps
that just refuse to turn on are history."

Jan > Well that is almost like saying:
Jan > "Our cars start every time, unlike noisy
Jan > other ones that just refuse to start..."
Jan > Gimme a break.
Jan >

Do any of your LED lamps "just refuse to turn on" ?
ROFL

What do you think the odds are that
FINsix will make it to 2015?

 

[[email protected]]

There's two schools of thought regarding patents with my energy
extraction clients. One school believes that patents are better than
nothing to protect a new gadget. The other school believes that patents
only reveal the inner workings of a new gadget to pirates. What one
believes seems to hinge on what happened to one's father.

In the former case, the father-in-law of one my clients invented a new
gadget and did not patent it. The inner workings of the gadget got
ripped off soon after it hit the oil field.

In the latter case, the father of one of my clients got ripped off by
pirates who used the father's patent as a blueprint. So the son did not
file a patent on a new invention. Instead the son housed his new gadget
in a virtual vault made of steel.

Black box virtual vaults (that are not always painted black) are common
in the oil field. One client suspected that a black box rented by him
contained little more than a PC. But the "if we detect that you opened
our black box you own it" clause in the rental contract along with a
sky high sticker price kept the enigma intact.

That sort of arrangement is best, where possible IMHO. If you can
keep your device secret, keep it secret. That costs nothing, needs
no paperwork, has no fees, and never expires.

But, that doesn't work if you're selling something with a clever
circuit that anyone can take apart and understand.

RCA profited mightily from its guerrilla hold on radio patents. So
"General" Sarnoff reckoned that RCA was entitled to own all of the
newfangled television patents too. But an unknown named Philo Farnsworth
invented television first.

That set up a "David versus Goliath" struggle, but instead of a sword
the Goliath named RCA wielded a bunch of off-the-wall patents.
Apparently the "General" thought that, "If you can't dazzle them with
brilliance, baffle them with BS!" Unfortunately this time around Goliath
used its legal might to win by dragging things out in court until
Farnsworth's patents expired.

I don't quite understand that last bit. IIRC, patent damages would
still be collectable on the pre-expiration period of infringement
even after the patent expired.

Cheers,
James Arthur