In the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at the Cork Institute, various projects are underway designing new electronic components for both the computer, telecommunications and process industries. The efforts are in both the analysis and understanding of circuits as much as in their design and fabrication. The fields are varied and include chip design, predictive control, noise cancellation systems, motor characteristics identification and power supplies. A few examples are given.

Work is at present being undertaken for ArteSyn Technologies Limited, Youghal, Co. Cork, in the design of low wattage power electronic converters. Both the telecommunication and computer industries require highly accurate power supplies at various output voltage levels, irrespective of the load and input voltage levels. They also require the power supply to sense an over current or an over/under input voltage condition and for the circuit to self protect itself in such an eventuality. In essence, a high performance and robust control strategy is required for the power converter.

Another major thrust is to reduce the size of power supply units to allow for smaller units and, consequentially, allowing the use of automated manufacturing techniques. This entails a very focused study of the losses in the power converter and how the control strategy can help in increasing the overall efficiency and reducing down the losses. A Ph.D. student is looking at the temperature stress of the individual components of a typical power converter to see which items can be engineered in such a manner that the overall converter can operate at a higher temperature. The result of this will be to have higher losses per volume or, put another way, a greater through-put of watts per volume to produce the losses. It is hoped that the final converters will be in a dual-in-line package, allowing for ease of final product assembly. A cellular arrangement will be necessary with these converters to allow for paralleling of them for greater current output. This will require current sharing topologies between the converters.

In another related area, chip design has been undertaken for Silicon Systems Design Limited, an innovative silicon intellectual property company. The project focused on full custom design of phase lock loop systems for clock recovery and synthesis. Among the deliverables of this project was a full custom delay lock loop. This was fabricated under the Europratice program.