EEWeb PULSE - Interview with Parviz Ghaffaripour

Akros Silicon CEO, Parviz Ghaffaripour, was recently interviewed by EEWeb Pulse. Here he discusses his career and experiences that led to his present leadership position at Akros.

He then explains the Energy Management features in Akros SoC products that ease the design challenges for applications where low power and small size cannot be achieved with traditional "bag of chips" approaches.

Onboard isolation and primary side measurement capability provides breakthrough system integration that is a "once in a lifetime invention".

 http://s.eeweb.com/pulse/eeweb-pulse-2012-55-Parviz-Ghaffaripour.pdf

How did you become interested electronics and engineering?

I was very interested in mathematics and science in junior high and high school, so studying engineering seemed to be the logical choice in college. I went to UC Berkeley and got my bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. Later on, I continued my education to receive my MSEE from Santa Clara University and Executive MBAs from Stanford and Western Ontario.

I started my career as a professional analog IC design engineer at Exar Corporation. I’m old enough to know how to design circuits by relying on paper and pencil rather than computers. What I always liked about analog IC design was anticipating the results of several parameters before making a decision, which I see as analogous to playing chess.

I spent the next 21 years at Exar Corp, National Semiconductor and Maxim Integrated Products. When I joined Maxim the late Jack Gifford, whom I regard as a legend in our industry, offered me the amazing opportunity to choose what I wanted to work on. There I helped start several different product lines including LED display drivers, supervisory system functions (including thermal monitoring and power management devices), and high-speed interconnects for infotainment in automotive applications.

I left Maxim to follow my dream of starting my own company in the power management area. I met the board of directors of Akros Silicon while I was pitching my own company. Akros, which was founded in 2005, had developed a unique isolation technology called GreenEdge^TM and faced the challenge of utilizing and proliferating this proven technology into many product types and creating revenue. Given my background, I immediately realized I wanted to join the company.

Have you had any noteworthy engineering experiences, and is there any advice you could give to the EE community based on your experience?

With 28 years in the industry working with five companies, I’ve worked on many different projects. The noteworthy products that come to mind that I designed or co-designed are the ignition controller for Magnavox (Honda) motorcycles, the first 3v RS232, the first LVDS driver and receiver products, and the Boomer audio power amplifier. And now, of course, with Akros I am working with a very unique technology that revolutionizes the whole concept of energy management

From my experience I believe it’s very important for designers to think outside of the frame, or the box, we’re put in. For example, an IC designer is typically given a set of specifications that narrowly define a specific part and is then asked to design to those specifications. This “bag of chips” approach might have been adequate in early days, but today this design methodology leads to what I believe is a difficulty in the industry. Today’s system boards incorporate many component ICs that were not designed to work together but were designed by different people, at different times, and in different technologies.

In contrast, it’s beneficial to consider the needs of the overall system and to be able to explain in layman terms how a specific part will be used and how it will benefit the end design. Each of us should try to step outside of our comfort zone and dabble in other areas; IC designers should be able to take the system designers’ point of view and system designers should understand IC design, and so forth. This is the approach we take at Akros.

Could you tell us more about GreenEdge?

The concept behind our GreenEdge isolation technology is based on approaching energy management differently from the way power management is approached. Traditionally, power management has been identified with voltage or current conversion, and almost every analog IC design company provides products for this arena. And now in the last five years, several overseas companies have joined the power management business with the goal of providing similar solutions but at much lower prices. Meanwhile, in recent years the “green” movement has made energy management more of a priority. Akros recognized this important shift back in 2005 and began to focus on how to increase the energy efficiency of systems.

At Akros we asked a very basic question: What does energy management mean? We’ve all seen the advertisements telling us to unplug our TVs and computers because even though they’re turned off, they still consume power when connected to, say, AC power or to a high-voltage power source. Estimates are that consumers spend something like $28 billion dollars in energy waste from our PCs being connected to power while not in use. That translates to 30% of energy that is generated being wasted.

This knowledge led us to ask a more difficult question: Why is this happening? The obvious answer was lack of access to the primary side of the system.

I can explain it this way: a system has both a primary and a secondary side. The high-voltage, or primary, side is usually connected to either an AC voltage or a high-voltage DC. The low-voltage, or secondary, side is the one that consumers come in contact with. Safety purposes and regulations require that the secondary side is separated, or isolated, from the primary side of the system. Most of the activities in the power management arena have been focused on this secondary side.

This system-level view spurred us to come up with a solution that not only handles the requirements of the secondary side, but also creates a “bridge” to the high-voltage primary side. In this way, GreenEdge provides an isolation  

barrier between the primary and secondary side of the system and also serves as a communication path between the two sides. This results in physical isolation for safety reasons, but it also enables system designers to communicate across the isolation barrier so they can monitor either side and make decisions based on the environmental parameters, thereby creating a digital communication path and isolation barrier at the same time.

Now that we had the concept crystallized, it opened up the door to a lot of other possibilities. It meant that we could integrate anything that is around a system. For example, the products that we have introduced in the isolated DC to DC converter area, whether Power over Ethernet (PoE) or isolated DC-to-DC, can replace the functionality of up to nine ICs, several opto-couplers, and many other control functions.

This solution also allows us to eliminate many redundancies in the system, making the solution smaller and lower cost. It also provides energy management features, which means being able to manage power based on the system’s environmental parameters. Take an IP phone for example. Typically, a phone is only used about 20% of the time, yet it consumes power the other 80% of the time when it’s not in use. Using the GreenEdge for motion sensor or input monitoring, the phone can be put into different stages of standby or shutdown, saving energy when it’s not in use, and then it can be quickly turned back on when it is.

Where has the technology been implemented?

GreenEdge can be used in many different applications. It can be used to create energy management solutions for isolated interface applications where isolation is required for active performance and safety reasons. It also can be used in the area of battery management and in alternative energy applications, such as solar cells and so forth. So this technology provides a basis for different technologies and applications. Initially, we have chosen two main areas: PoE and general purpose, isolated DC-DC converters. For PoE, the main drivers for applications are IP telephony, security cameras, wireless access points, IP terminals and security systems, to name a few. The isolated DC-DC converters expand horizontally across many applications and many different equipment types, including medical, industrial, telecom, and datacom applications. Today, we have shipped many products and have many tier-1 customers who have designed in our devices. We started getting revenue in late 2009, and since then it’s been growing rapidly

Our answer to energy management is to give system designers access to both the high-voltage primary side and the low-voltage secondary side with our GreenEdge technology. By providing a communication path for each side to communicate, system designers can now make the right decisions.

How do Akros’ solutions help manufacturers of electronic equipment create more efficient and advanced products at reduced costs?

System designers know how to design systems that conserve energy. The problem has been the practicality of their designs. In other words, designers have to incorporate many extra, individual IC components and circuitries that can cause the end solution to be too large or expensive. When coming up with GreenEdge technology, the most important factor was to provide a solution that was practical. As a result, GreenEdge allows designers to incorporate energy management features into their system designs in a simple, cost-effective way. The GreenEdge products are not only pin-compatible but also PCB-layout compatible. With this family of products, we offer a solution that can fulfill a variety of needs by customizing the feature set. So now system designers can use basically one design to address the needs of nearly all of their products.

Once we designed the GreenEdge isolation technology and provided solutions for isolated applications, we turned our attention to other as­pects of the system in the second­ary side. Our GreenEdge product is a pretty complicated system-on-a-chip (SoC), incorporating many innovative circuit blocks. One of the blocks inside is called power management unit, or PMU. Many companies in our industry have re­ferred to blocks similar to our PMU as SoCs. So you can see, in rela­tive comparison from a functionality point of view, we offer much more sophisticated products, which are also easy to use.

So, we took the PMU block that serves the same function as GreenEdge for the non-isolated application and generated an energy management solution that is programmable and flexible for the secondary side. We dubbed it Energy$ense™ since it is cost effective. It is also a sensible energy management solution that accommodates a variety of combinations for power management architectures such as buck, boost, LED drive, and it adds converter channels as needed.

For an example of how it is used, take a set-top box application. One of the functions in any set-top box or media player is video encoding. To save energy, you want to enable video encoding functions only when necessary because these functions consume so much power. Actually, it’s only rarely that the video encoding function must be turned on. Energy$ense products enable the system designer to turn off the power to the video encoding function when it isn’t needed, and as soon as it’s needed, to instantly turn it back on, which saves a lot of energy. Another feature of Energy$ense is programmability in

With GreenEdge technology, Akros has developed a differentiated and pragmatic solution that addresses the actual needs of system designers. It’s an invention that comes once in a lifetime.

terms of sequencing, or how to start up the different ICs. By providing this programmability and flexibility, a designer can provide a better solution for the devices that are using different CPUs. In today’s systems, for instance, several CPU manufacturers require special sequencing and startup for their power supplies. Now, with typical solutions, you have to use different circuitries for each one of these CPUs. But the Energy$ense solution allows our ICs to work with different CPUs through the programmability feature. In this way, the system designer basically uses one design that works with several different CPUs.  

What direction do you see your business heading in the next few years?

We provide programmability through the I2C in order to customize our solution for different system designs. This enables the system designer to create a solution for today while adapting it for future designs, even if the future design is different in terms of the system architecture or the CPU selections. For example, there are now different international standards for energy efficiency, including Euro 6, which did not exist a few years ago.

Our GreenEdge solution is flex­ible enough to put the system into different levels of standby and, through the programmability fea­ture, it meets different international standards. Additionally, we can set up various output voltages, we can do voltage margining on output volt­ages, we can monitor input power profiles and we can accommodate several sequencing scenarios. All of these features give system de­signers the confidence knowing they can use our system today and adopt it for later designs as well.

The GreenEdge solution is changing the industry paradigm. Many of our colleagues answer system designers’ need for energy management by providing higher-efficiency power converters. After much hard work they may gain a few more percentages of efficiency and call it an energy management solution. We, on the other hand, look at efficiency as just one aspect of energy management. In order to provide an energy management solution, we offer key features that system designers can use to monitor their design.

In our view, energy management is providing a solution that encompasses five aspects. The first is being able to do real-time energy monitoring; meaning, for example, being able to measure how much power the device actually uses so it can instantly make the right decision. By having the ability to do health monitoring of the system, the customer can reduce diagnostics and service calls. The second, of course, is providing high-efficiency converters. The third is providing the flexibility for the system designer to do different functions, which we call digital power control, such as being able to reduce or increase the backlight depending on when you need it, or to adjust output voltages customized to the CPU mode. The fourth is providing fast-transient response, which is the ability to react quickly to the environment and to turn power supplies on and off accordingly, or leave one on while turning the other off. And, finally, the fifth aspect is providing a solution with low EMI emissions and that reduces radiation and filtering.

What challenges do you foresee in the industry and where is Akros headed?

The industry challenge, I believe, is for other companies to think about how they’re going to provide solutions for energy management. There are many IC companies providing single function ICs or components for power management applications, but, as we discussed, these components do not necessarily “talk” to each other. Therefore today’s system designers have the onerous job of providing a system using disconnected components to address energy management issues, which is not very practical. System designers are looking for easy, effective solutions. This means that IC companies must rethink their strategies and start providing more integrated and more intelligent products.

And, of course, all of these solutions must be cost-competitive. For instance, a typical scenario in last few years is for a company to design in a DSP and then add a lot of other analog components to it. Everything including the kitchen sink is thrown into the design since it’s a big engine that does everything. But, unfortunately, this is not a practical solution. Solutions must be practical, cost effective, and flexible enough to be customized for the system in mind. This is the challenge that I see our industry is facing and I believe the Akros approach is changing the playing field.

Our answer to energy management is to give system designers access to both the high-voltage primary side and the low-voltage secondary side with our GreenEdge technology. By providing a communication path for each side to communicate, system designers can now make the right decisions.

In terms of where Akros is headed, we are beginning to apply this technology to other market segments and have many more in mind. With GreenEdge technology, Akros has developed a differentiated and pragmatic solution that addresses the actual needs of system designers. It’s an invention that comes once in a lifetime.