New series features techniques for designing a power supply for performance processors

Avnet Electronics Marketing, an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE: AVT), Texas Instruments (TI) and Xilinx® have launched a new eight-part, weekly video series emphasizing power supply design techniques for field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

The new Analog eLab™ video series features engineering subject matter experts from Avnet, TI and Xilinx, discussing and demonstrating innovative solutions and best practices for typical design considerations.

Each video is approximately 5-15 minutes long, and helps solve challenges in various stages of power supply design, such as analyzing system requirements, researching compatible devices, circuit design and verifying completed hardware.

“The FPGA development community has a long history of sharing best practices for high performance, low cost, and low power design methodologies and the eLab Video Series represents another contribution that shares real-world examples to help designers and developers reduce development costs and time to market,” says Patrick Dorsey, senior director product marketing for Xilinx. “Using the Spartan-3A FPGA evaluation kit from Avnet as a guide, designers can use the video to quickly learn how they can use Xilinx, TI, and Avnet tools to increase their productivity by leveraging open, programmable platforms.”

“Providing flexible power solutions to satisfy power consumption requirements is an ongoing challenge for many FPGA designers,” says Barry Papermaster, TI’s worldwide marketing manager for power management. “Through the video series, we can arm designers with practical principles, new power management design concepts and real-world examples that will help them optimize the power in their systems more quickly and easily.”

“The philosophy behind the series is to demonstrate recommended design methodology for FPGA system power supply, and includes design information from Xilinx, tools/devices from TI, and a system example from Avnet,” says Jim Beneke, vice president of global technical marketing for Avnet Electronics Marketing. “We wanted to keep subject matter fairly simple while still providing a complete introduction to the power supply design process—from initial concept to testing real hardware.”

New eLab videos will be launched weekly through January 28, 2009. For more information, please visit: www.em.avnet.com/FPGAPowereLab