Distributors Help Fuel Eco-Friendly Designs

Soaring energy costs and growing concern over the environmental impact of electronic devices have put electronics manufacturers in the hot seat as consumers demand high-tech devices that are not only better, faster and cheaper, but also greener. As the burden of fulfilling this demand cascades through the supply chain, it ultimately stops at the design engineer. In support of OEM customers’ efforts to capitalize on the opportunity to turn sustainability into a competitive advantage, authorized distributors are turning up the heat on their environmentally conscious solutions.

Though energy efficiency is not a new concept for electronics engineers, meeting both regulatory and customer-driven environmental standards has unquestionably complicated the already arduous new product development process, notes Joe Tillison, technology director, Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, Phoenix. “Going green is not as simple as replacing less efficient components with eco-friendly parts,” he said. “As with any technological innovation, full benefit of a green design requires system level integration.”

This is where distribution’s technical expertise and market breadth can be of tremendous value to the OEM, said Robin Gray, executive vice president of National Electronic Distributors Association, Alpharetta, Ga. “As energy prices continue to rise, consumers are looking for more energy efficient products. Authorized distributors are in a unique position to both direct customers to those suppliers whose products are more energy efficient and to provide technical support for implementing these new, complex technologies.” Today, many distributors are doing just that. In response to the flurry of demand for low-power solutions, authorized distributors like Avnet Inc., Newark Electronics Corp., Future Electronics and Arrow Electronics Inc. have launched a variety of services intended to facilitate more eco-friendly design.

Avnet offers a number of technical workshops to introduce digital designers to basic techniques for energy-efficient power supply design. “We understand that most digital designers have only a limited amount of experience with designing power supplies, so they may not understand the implications of choosing one topology over another,” said Tillison. “The focus of these sessions is to make designers who do not specialize in power supplies, aware of some of the simple choices they can make that can optimize the efficiency of their power supply.”

For example, during Avnet’s “Power Supply for the Digital Designer” On-Ramp workshop, leaders demonstrated a scenario in which using a switch mode power supply is preferable to using several linear regulators. “The digital designer might not consider this path because it is somewhat more difficult for them. But once they see it done, they recognize the system wide benefit in terms of both cost and reliability,” said Tillison. Avnet also conducts supplier-specific programs featuring devices from Actel Corp., Xilinx Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc.

With hundreds of suppliers releasing thousands of products a year, keeping tabs on the latest low-power products can be a full-time job. As part of its Technology First initiative, Newark Electronics has launched a microsite dedicated to energy conservation, which features an online catalog of energy-efficient products. Newark has also launched an international design competition called live edge: Electronic Design for the Global Environment. The goal of the contest is to give electronics design engineers the opportunity to have a positive impact on the future by designing eco-friendly products, explained Jamie Furness, director of global technology, Newark, Chicago.

The industry-wide campaign for more energy-efficient electronics has also sparked tremendous interest in high brightness light emitting diodes (HBLEDs). “The technology of power LEDs is very synergistic with the whole energy efficiency movement because they are inherently very energy efficient,” said Furness. In fact, HBLEDs can generate the same amount of light as a traditional light bulb using less than 20 percent of the energy, noted Cary Eskow, director of Avnet LightSpeed, the solid state lighting and LED business unit of Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas.

With applications ranging from cell phones and automobiles to general-purpose lighting and traffic signals, market research firm Strategies Unlimited, Mountain View, Calif., predicts the revolutionary lighting technology market will see a compound annual growth rate of 20 percent in the next four years. By 2012, the total market is expected to reach $11.4 billion. Despite the tremendous potential of the technology, power LEDs require a significant amount of technical proficiency in order to achieve the desired performance. “HBLEDs are a remarkable technological breakthrough, however engineers must understand that a solid state illumination product is a system, not a single component,” said Eskow. Without the appropriate peripherals, such as drivers and ballasts, an HBLED solution could end up increasing a system’s power consumption. 

Avnet, Newark, Arrow Electronics and Future Electronics are among a select few authorized distributors that currently offer specialized technical support for customers wishing to incorporate this new lighting solution into new designs. Avnet’s team of dedicated illumination engineers -- called illumineers -- has design experience with solid state lighting, secondary optics, thermal calculations, mechanical engineering and analog power stages. Avnet also offers LED Power Supply Kits for evaluating HBLEDs. The kits include reference evaluation boards and documentation.

Future Lighting Solutions, a division of Future Electronics, Montreal, has recently launched the LED Light Engine Selector, a Web-based tool to enable faster, easier integration of high power Luxeon LEDs into new lighting systems, according to the company. As part of its ACES (Arrow Consulting Engineering Services) program, Arrow Electronics’ Lighting Group has partnered with a number of certified third-party engineering services firms that specialize in high-performance LED lighting solutions. Arrow also offers reference design services, an online development tool selection site, free development tool evaluation program and integration services.

As with every technology innovation, there is a learning curve associated with HBLEDs. Yet, with guidance from distributor partners, early adopters can gain market advantages by differentiating their products in terms of lower energy costs, lower total cost of ownership and reliability, Eskow argued. “As their markets mature and HBLED replacements become commonplace, these OEMs can leverage their experience and begin to exploit other capabilities,” he said. “This might include variable color temperature, ZigBee-controlled lighting, unique form factors, solar power and precision color control to name a few. We’ve worked on all of these in the past year.”