new, and very, very ugly

Yep. Marketing yet again rules the roost.

I like ON Semi's best. A page full of everything. They understand that engineers can read screeds of text at high speed.

I wonder if National will even notice the further reduction in the odds that I will design in there parts.

I do hope that they did patent the "Solar magic" technology. I know that somewhere in these news groups I published the basic design for an adaptive solar powered charger that optimized the power from the panel. My design had a lot of analog to it but converting that analog to use something like a PIC to do the same function would be very easy.

re solar. Graph at the top of this blog looks interesting

martin

This is more impressive

John Larkin wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com:

Well that's a nasty bit of website so-called "design". Looks like someone got all excited because they found some Javascript menu- toys and just *had* to use *all* of them :p

Nanosolar has spent about $170 million so far. It will be interesting to see if their stuff ever gets commercial.

One big problem with solar is storage. A car that's half batteries still has mediocre range and long recharge times. Does that graph assume a magical extension cord from the PV array to the car on the freeway?

John

In the Maria Bartiromo interview with Brian Halla, he gives an analogy about the flashlight that doesn't seem to fit. What do you think? And keep your eyes off of Maria, I think she's hot, 10 yrs ago she was burning hot! :-) Mike

I do hope Nanosolar suceed

No idea, tried to get to the source article, but they want money/login to read it.

martin

Democrats _will_ give us electric cars... like your city buses with overhead power feeds... no passing, just do what you're told and be good little doobies... otherwise you'll get "re-education through labor" ;-)

...Jim Thompson

So they "invented" distributed MPPT?

Can someone out here make a strong pot of coffee?

The Exxon patent has expired on mppt, there are however variations on this patent still active. But studies have shown that the basic perturb and observe can be tweeked to be just as efficient.

Cheers

It didn't seem like MPPT to me--ISTM they're claiming some way of bypassing the problem, in a series-connected array, where shadowing even one cell kills the entire output.

Maybe a bunch of parallelable current-mode boosters?

When I tried a week or two ago you had to register and e-mail for details, so I didn't.

Cheers, James Arthur ~~~~~~

"What types of problems do non-uniform shading or shadows cause for solar power?

Shading just a few cells will drop the panel's output disproportionately, often to less than half. It can even take out an entire panel. The impact of shading on a PV array has a much greater influence on the electrical energy harvest than the footprint of the shadow. Shading just a few cells will drop the module's output to less than half. National's SolarMagic technology allows each panel in the array to operate at its peak performance regardless of the shading of the other panels in the array."

Only when the sun shines brigtly :)

petrus bitbyter

Hey, just received this from National, in response to my comment to them about their ugly web site. It makes no sense at all, of course:

Hello,

In response to your request:

Regards,

Central Applications Support

New PowerWise® LMP223x micropower precision op amp family provides guaranteed low voltage offset drift over temperature and CMOS inputs for improved accuracy and battery life in instrumentation, portable medical diagnostic, and sensor applications. More info at

Please provide a detailed explanation of your technical question? Unspeakably hideous and repulsive web site.

Work in Progress Comments by CAG

How did you hear about the [NSID]?

(additional incoherent nonsense snipped)

I sure hope they don't go the key account route like TI seemed to have taken. The consequences are now reflected in they stock valuation.

We have had recent visits from both TI and Analog Devices, with about the same message: the huge-volume cell-phone and DSP business sucks, because there's huge volume but no margin. So the emphasis is back to general-purpose analog and data converters, and the ideal customer is the small to medium-sized company, and distribution matters again.

TI claims to have pretty much sorted out the Burr-Brown testing fiasco, too. We'll see.

John

Sometimes I wonder what some of the suits with their high-faluting MBA degrees are really doing. They could have learned from the 90's. You go key account, eventually that leads to rock-bottom such as automotive, then you get squeezed along the lines of "Our researchers have determined that you are making 8% profit margin on these parts. Your competitor XYZ Corporation has agreed to a 7% price cut effective next month. What do you say?". Does anyone remember Senor Lopez?

But why don't they answer simple questions about their parts?