Power Management System Integration

Head: Marise Bafleur
Secretary: Claude Laffore

The spread of electronic solutions in every society field (such as portable electronics, fly-by-wire and car-by-wire), requires new electrical power conversion architectures/structures. Thanks to the evolution of technologies, the embedded computation power is more and more important. As a result, the maximum consumption of a high-performance microprocessor is nowadays of 167W under 1.1V voltage, and should be in the range of 198W under 1V voltage in 2009. With current peaks of about 200A and a required voltage regulation at ±2% (±15mV), supplying such microprocessors represents a real challenge.
Another issue concerns the power autonomy of portable systems, which has to be addressed with the full integration of the power conversion system including the passive devices required for filtering and in a near future, an energy micro-source.

Finally, not only the performance of power conversion systems should increase but their large dissemination also requires an increased robustness and reliability regarding extreme operation conditions (temperature, inductive switching...) and stresses from their environment (radiations, ESD, EMI…), particularly in the case of embedded systems.

Given such challenges, and on the basis of his background acquired in the field of power conversion systems, as well as power device physics and technologies, ISGE research group focuses his activities on the integration of systems providing an operational and reliable power conversion function. To support this research strategy, the activities are organized according to five complementary and tightly interdependent main research topics:

New power devices.
Architecture of power conversion systems.
Electro-thermal modeling.
ESD (electrostatic discharges) and EMI (electromagnetic interferences) reliability.
Integration of power management systems.

Some realizations: