Inject performance to STB designs

Cable and satellite content providers are continually introducing new services. These new features include Internet access, video on demand, DVD/CD players and HDDs, which are causing simple STBs to evolve into highly capable home gateways. These advanced boxes establish a LAN within the home. Consequently, they typically have an Ethernet or FireWire port, or some other means of communications—possibly even Bluetooth. In turn, these more sophisticated STBs require more power. As the power for these systems increases, so does the system architect's concern about temperature rise, time-to-market, efficiency, regulatory approval, cost, power sequencing and power factor correction (PFC).

One way to address these concerns is to change the power supply architecture from the traditional multiple output flyback power supply to a higher performance, more flexible distributed power architecture with point-of-load (POL) regulators. Most current STB's use offline multiple output flyback power supply architectures. These power supplies provide as much as 30W of power with conversion efficiencies in the 65 percent range. Advanced STB supplies provide up to 65W with a single distributed DC voltage such as 12V, and use downstream POL regulators yielding a combined conversion efficiency of up to 80 percent.

View the PDF document for more information.