Our Experience
In Brief
Ernie has spent the large majority of his career inventing, designing, and troubleshooting power electronics circuits with power levels from a few watts to 100 kilowatts. Power Electronics Innovations Laboratory has a fully equipped laboratory for research and design of circuits and systems. Any additional hardware or software product needed to complete your job to optimal performance will be purchased by us at no additional cost to you. Ernie has designed AC to AC, AC to DC, DC to AC, and DC to DC converters and inverters and class D audio amplifiers. Ernie was a VP level engineer for TI/Power Trends where he did product design, wrote invention disclosures and patent applications and performed design reviews contributing to all of the company’s products under development. As an expert in topology selection he also proposed topologies for potential new designs for new product developments. Ernie has served as a systems circuit design engineer for power management semiconductor products that were reduced to silicon, although he is not a semiconductor device engineer. Ernie has also served as a litigation consultant and has provided expert legal services to patent law firms. Ernie is an industry leading technical expert who had been recommended to new design customers after their retirements by Bruce Carsten and Ed Bloom, both winners of Power Electronics Technology’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Career Highlights and Experiences
Technical experience is focused mainly on power supply development, especially development of high frequency, high efficiency, high density power converters and modules. Other areas of expertise include EMC, audio circuit and systems design, and control systems for a variety of applications. Industries served include the power supply industry, solid state devices manufacturers, avionics industry, military/aerospace manufacturers, consumer appliances, solid state lighting industry, medical electronics, residential and industrial control industry. Ernie has 34 issued patents. Almost all of the patent applications were written and prosecuted by Ernie. Ernie has produced a long list of publications and professional advancement seminars (14). Eight seminars were presented at APEC in the last 20 years, 4 of the 8 were the highest attended seminars, 3 were standing room only.
Ernie developed an analysis tool for numerical topology selection, published in Power Electronics Technology Magazine in a 3 part article series in 2006. From 1995 to 1999 Ernie and his software partner developed a powerful commercial Windows based power supply simulator software product called Power Witts. Areas of expertise include all aspects of power electronics and audio electronics design. Areas of exceptional expertise include topology selection, soft switching technology, gate drivers, design for high efficiency and high density power converters, magnetics design, control system design, and EMC. Projects include circuits for the world’s first IC driver (LX1780) for a SiC Power JFET, a Power Supply In Package (PSIP) product with double the current state of the art power density, higher efficiency, and lower cost, several LED lighting circuits, and isolated and powered gate drivers for a high frequency H bridge, and a PFC high power external adapter with higher efficiency and power density than the current state of the art.
Notable Achievements
2024 – present Designing circuits, magnetic circuit elements, and a topological approach for a 100KW 3 phase PFC input modular HV power supply for an undersea actuator.
2022 – present Designed PFC circuits (Patent No. 11,626,795) and multi-level zero volt switching (ZVS) flying capacitor circuits (Patent No. 11,515,789 ) that advance the state of the art in performance and efficiency. The PFC circuit is a single stage design that reduces the number of switches and windings in the main power path, halves the peak power processed in the secondary circuit, achieves precise power factor, achieves tight load voltage regulation with no line frequency ripple, and sets a new higher standard for power density and overall efficiency of PFC rectifiers with isolation. Designed and designing many power supplies for a variety of applications.
2021 Presented an in-house seminar on “Overcoming the Obstacles to Higher Power Density” for L3Harris.
2020 and 2021 Recipient of RISE awards for outstanding service at L3Harris
2016 Presented a new seminar on non-idealities and parasitics in components and system elements at APEC 2016.
2013 Presented a new standing room only seminar on Gate Drive Design at APEC 2013.
2011 Designed the first ever Wide Band Gap (WBG) gate driver IC (AAC611/LX1780) intended for SiC VJFETs and SiC bipolar transistors. Included in this product is an invention that efficiently generates both positive and negative regulated voltages using a small single winding chip inductor as the sole magnetic circuit element.
2011 Invented (61/231,116) single magnetic circuits for LED drivers. These circuits could accomplish PFC and driving multiple LED strings using a single magnetic circuit element.
2008 Presented a standing room only seminar at APEC 2008 on soft switching. An updated version of this seminar was also presented at APEC 2011.
2007 – 2011 Developed a 3 watt megahertz range power supply in package (PSIP) product with industry leading efficiency and power density based on the ZVS coupled inductor boost converter described below and an innovative (7,956,491) integrated magnetic circuit element that combined isolation transformer, magnetic energy storage, and feedback pulse transformer in a single tiny EI core. This project was near completion when it was abandoned by the company that purchased the company that originated the development.
2007 Invented (7,944,188) a ZVS bridgeless boost converter which avoided the common mode noise issues of other bridgeless PFC circuits.
2007 Invented (7,589,571) capacitively coupled level shifting circuits for gate drive with advantages of size and performance for high switching frequency applications.
2006 Invented (7,551,459 and 7,864,549) the zero voltage switching coupled inductor boost converter which is destined to become an industry standard power supply topology for most low cost isolated converter applications. The coupled inductor boost converter and its ZVS implementation have about the same parts count as corresponding isolated flyback converters but offers advantages in efficiency, size, cost, and EMC.
2006 Invented (7,480,156) a family of minimum voltage tapped inductor converters, both hard and soft switching, with conduction loss and voltage stress advantages over previously known tapped inductor circuits. In prior art tapped inductor circuits the voltage stress of at least one of the switches exceeds the line (buck) or load (boost) voltage. In this new topology none of the switches ever sees more than the higher of the line or load voltage.
2006 Invented (7,606,051) a methodology for reducing the number of magnetic elements in a broad range of isolated ZVS circuits which simultaneously improves EMC.
2006 Presented seminars at both APEC and Power Systems World on the topic of High Efficiency Design. The seminar taught loss mechanisms and how to reduce them in all the power stage elements in a power converter/inverter. It also taught the numerical topology selection model described below.
2003 – 2005 Developed a mathematical model for numerical topology selection based on the operating conditions and operational equations of the topologies in a true apples to apples comparison. The model accurately predicts the relative performances of different power stage circuit topologies. The numerical scores indicates the magnitude of the differences in topologies. I developed a spread sheet for comparing about 30 of the most popular circuit topologies, both isolated and non-isolated. The spread sheet allows an engineer to compare topologies and optimize each topology, so that, for examples, the turns ratios and duty cycle ranges result in optimal efficiency. The use of this spreadsheet led to the discovery or invention of several circuit topologies that are clearly superior (in terms of efficiency, cost, and size) in some applications to popular circuit topologies commonly used in those applications.
2003 Presented first APEC seminar. The topic was EMC for power supplies. Updated and/or extended versions of the seminar were subsequently presented at Power Systems World 2003, APEC 2005, and APEC 2010.
2002 Invented (6,580,255, 7,714,548, and 10/878,448) adaptive gate timing circuits for optimal performance of zero voltage switching converters. These adaptive gate timing circuits included circuits that could accomplish optimal timing for both the sufficient energy condition and the insufficient energy condition in a ZVS converter.
2001 – 2003 Invented (6,198,260, 6,411,153, 6,462,963, 6,822,427, and 6,452,814) several universally applicable zero voltage switching cells to replace the main switch in a hard switching power converter to transform a hard switching converter into a soft switching converter. Also invented several other ZVS circuits including ZVS tapped inductor circuits.
2001 Invented (6,483,369) the composite cascode switch where a low voltage switch is used to control a higher power high voltage switch by controlling the current in the source lead of the high voltage switch. This technique is now commonly known as source switching and is often used for controlling depletion mode GaN and SiC switches.
2000 Invented (6,252,383, 6,304,065, 6,507,176, and 6,437,999) a set of circuit synthesis methods to enable continuous terminal currents, ripple cancellation techniques, and displacement current noise cancellation. A 4 part article series was published about these methods in 2003 in Power Electronics Technology magazine.
1999 Invented (6,147,886) a ZVS Weinberg (a form of single ended forward converter) as one member in a family of ZVS converters. One distinguishing feature of the ZVS Weinberg was that the output current ripple cancelled at the nominal line voltage thereby enabling some reduction of filter element volume.
1999 Invented (6,101,108) a PFC system that could dramatically reduce the amount of power processed and thereby increase system efficiency.
1999 Invented (6,114,939) a planar magnetic circuit element structure that eliminated most of the proximity effect losses of conventional spiral wound planar magnetic circuit elements.
1997 – 1999 Designed a power supply simulator (Power Witts) which was faster than any other simulator on the market at that time. With a reasonably fast XP machine this simulator could simulate a network analyzer generating Bode plots by injecting a sine wave into the control loop (as in a real world network analyzer) which appeared to be in real time. PSIM and SIMPLIS can do much the same thing now as a result of much advanced computer technology.
1997 Redesigned a flyback converter that was previously having reliability issues for Amway’s Asian appliance business. The new design had higher reliability (fewer failures) than any other power supply in Amway’s appliance business.
1992 Published “A Duty Cycle Extension Technique for Single-Ended Forward Converters”, This is a circuit that uses a low parts count lossless snubber to eliminate turn off switching losses and extend the maximum duty cycle range well beyond 50% thereby reducing conduction losses. This circuit has become very popular. Several companies have used it in high volume commercial products.
1990 – 1992 Led a team of engineers to design 12 very low noise switching power supplies for a noise sensitive Star Wars satellite experiment. Designed a switching power supply that had the lowest noise of any switching power supply, up to that point in time, that was measured at Goddard Space Flight Center. The primary contractor, Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab, indicated that, after the satellite was launched and experiments performed, the power supplies Ernie and his team designed worked flawlessly throughout the entire experiment.
1990 Invented the first commercially practical zero voltage switching (ZVS) flyback converter (5,402,329), now in large scale commercial production. This simple fixed frequency circuit requires only one magnetic circuit element and achieves elimination of drain circuit turn on switching losses without requiring the high AC currents associated with magnetizing current reversal.