About Ernie Wittenbreder
We advance the state of the art of power electronics circuit design with 34 patents, advanced seminars, papers and articles, breadth and depth of knowledge, and over 4 decades of experience to prove it.
Our CEO, Ernest H. Wittenbreder, Jr., holds two Master’s degrees, Electrical Engineering from Johns Hopkins University and Physics from Lehigh University. He has a Bachelor of Science degree with honors from Franklin & Marshall College with a double major in mathematics and physics.
Ernie began his career as a college physics professor and during that time he designed and sold high end modifications to popular commercial audio products through his own retail high fidelity audio company. He was a member of the Audio Engineering Society and a certified member of the Society of Audio Consultants. He left teaching in the late 70s for his first industrial position in which he designed a switched mode power supply for an audio power amplifier. Ernie has been doing mostly power electronics ever since.
From 1990 to 1992 Ernie was the lead power supply engineer for the MSX satellite project, part of the Star Wars program initiated by Ronald Reagan. The project was intended to determine if the mid-course correction of an ICBM could be detected thereby indicating if the ICBM was intended to quickly re-enter the earth’s atmosphere or enter earth orbit. The noise performance requirements for this project were much more severe than any project up to that point. Through his experience with noise performance requirements for the project, Ernie became a power supply EMC expert. When the noise performance of his first design for the MSX satellite project was measured at Goddard Space Flight Center in 1991, it was determined that Ernie’s initial design had the lowest measured noise of any switched mode power supply measured at Goddard up until that time. He and his team went on to design a total of 12 power supplies for the MSX project and those power supplies were the only systems on the MSX satellite that performed flawlessly throughout the entire experiment.
In 1990, Ernie founded his own corporation for power electronics consulting, Technical Witts, Inc., and he began publishing and inventing new compelling power electronics topologies. His first patent was issued in 1995 for a zero voltage switching (ZVS) active clamp flyback converter and a ZVS coupled inductor buck converter, now sometimes referred to as the flybuck topology. This patent has been licensed to several companies and has been in high volume production for over 20 years. The patent is one of the patents in the industry most cited by other patents.
Ernie is an industry leader in the number of soft switching circuits he has invented. He has invented both isolated and non-isolated soft switching converters and universal switching cells that can transform any hard switching converter into a soft switching converter. Over a time span of more than 3 decades he has published papers and presented numerous lectures on the subject.
Between 2003 and 2016 he presented seminars at the Power Systems World and APEC conferences on Soft Switching Circuits, EMC, High Efficiency Design, Gate Drive Design, and Circuit Parasitic Elements in Power Supplies. Four of his seminars were the highest attended seminars at the Applied Power Electronics Conference (APEC) in 2003, 2005, 2008 and 2011. Three seminars were standing room only. Ernie has also presented an in-house seminar on Overcoming the Obstacles to Higher Power Density.
Ernie has several patents for circuits and synthesis techniques for Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC) for power supplies. Ernie has presented four seminars on EMC for power supplies at APEC and Power Systems World and published a four-part article series on the subject in Power Electronics Technology Magazine in winter and spring of 2003. Three (2003, 2005 and 2010) of Ernie’s EMC seminars were presented at APEC. Two of those seminars (2003 and 2005) were the highest attended seminars of the conference and the 2005 seminar was standing room only.
Ernie has served a broad spectrum of companies including defense, medical, consumer appliances, transportation, communications, and aerospace providing short, intermediate, and long term consulting services from debugging and troubleshooting existing designs to de novo product design. He served as a top level engineer at Power Trends in 1999 and 2000.
Ernie is an industry leader in research and analysis of optimal topology selection for specific applications. One of his most significant accomplishments was the development and publication of a mathematical model for numerical topology selection called Component Stress Factor (CSF). CSF accomplishes a true “apples-to-apples” numerical comparison of power supply topologies based on the operating conditions and operating equations of the topologies. The model predicts which topology is better and indicates by how much better one topology is than another. He has given lectures on the subject, including APEC and Power Systems World seminars in 2006. A three-part article series on CSF was published in Power Electronics Technology magazine in the spring of 2006 and the use of the model is described in a 2014 IEEE paper ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7038001.