New products leaning more deeply toward internal digital control-among them a designer's kit from Texas Instruments that's intended to familiarize OEMs with the advantages of using DSPs (see Dec. 2, page 67)-promise to bring added functionality to switching supplies. Conceivably they will, because a major attribute of DSPs is to provide a universal software-based platform that works with standard hardware, such as the guts of a power supply, in order to create a custom solution. Thus, DSPs add a new dimension to the concept of modified-standard power supplies to reduce overall parts count, reliability, cost and time-to-market.

Such evolving techniques, this one having been pursued for a few years at least, almost unfailingly feed underlying questions of whether there's an actual need for the new technology. For one example, consider the ac-vs.-dc war that served as the underpinnings for the development of the utility power industry so many years ago.

Unlike that battle over "right," though, most of the civilized world now recognizes the discrete nature of nature itself, more basic than the analog world our senses seem to tell us we're in. Thus, like the ac-vs.-dc example, someone needed to develop the specific mathematics to understand what is, in this case, a more fundamental position.

Fundamental doesn't necessarily mean superior, of course. Certainly, the two DSPs used in TI's initial development kit, while replacing about 10 analog/digital functions in the traditional power supply, require a lot in the way of processing horsepower (approaching 40 Mips) to achieve the required control loop bandwidth, establish the needed power- and fault-management features, and so on.

Of course, that's all in the chip, but could the system perform better? Maybe. All the more reason to pursue digital power: There's still a lot more to uncover.