New emerging applications for smart power integrated circuits: technologies implications and new design techniques

Even if, for a long time, relegated to the role of modern Cinderella, smart power ICs have become a major business worth now more than a billion dollars, and power IC technology a revolutionary asset allowing small systems to be efficiently integrated into a single chip and new applications to be targeted. As a matter of fact, smart power ICs have been fundamental to portable equipment to guarantee longer and longer battery life, sensors/actuators to be smarter and smarter, remote nodes (in automotive, home automation, industrial controls) more and more intelligent. Without any interruption or slowing down, the pace of development is, in fact, still benefiting from, as all other traditional electronic disciplines, of finer and finer microlithography and higher and higher level of “on chip” integration