#101🚀 - Custom Tacos are always better🌮
SuperPowers for Electrical Engineers 🦸🏻♂️🦸🏼♀️
👋 Hello, friends! Dr. Molina here 👨🔧
Welcome to my newsletter! Here, on a weekly basis, I share my personal journey of building a company in the power electronics industry and the exciting new insights I gain about the world of Magnetics.
Power Electronic Panel - Ben (Tesla), Xu (Lunar Energy) and Chema (Frenetic)
Yesterday was a special day. The first meeting of the power electronics community in the Bay Area took place, and I feel excited about the reception I had when I shared that I had moved from Madrid to San Francisco due to my passion for Power Electronics and magnetics. Thank you very much!
The event started with some tacos that Maria had prepared for us. They were delicious. Meanwhile, we had the chance to greet familiar faces.
The first part consisted of an open discussion with questions that participants had sent in. Some of the questions that were addressed were:
How are Magnetics (Inductors, Transformers, Common Mode Choke) playing a role in the GaN and SiC designs within the power industry? Is this a primary focus within end customer design and implementation?
How do you see AI and machine learning technologies influencing the future of power electronics design and implementation?
What process do you follow to get magnetic suppliers, and which ones do you recommend?
As a manager or team lead, striking a balance between maintaining control and effective delegation is crucial. How do you approach delegation to ensure that tasks are assigned appropriately without falling into the trap of micromanaging? Can you share specific strategies or experiences where you successfully empowered your team while maintaining oversight?
But the question that sparked a more ambiguous conversation was about Artificial Intelligence. Many participants were waiting for my response, and my vision was:
Within the next 10 years, power supply designers will be ultimately assisted by AI software to build power supplies. The most important part is not related with design decisions or models but to the connection with final production. Helping us to take the best decisions and doing all the work to ensure the hardware will be built on time. - myself
But the topic of AI-based models came up in the conversation. From my perspective, it only makes sense in models without an acceptable analytical solution.
However, using AI to speed up algorithms and intelligently analyze many more combinations will be our ChatGPT.
One of the participants, Soheila Hamdad, with great experience, asked:
How can we define Artificial Intelligence in this context? -Soheila Hamdad
Honestly, it seemed like a great question to me.
The idea of AI in Power Electronics remains of interest, raises doubts, but everyone is eager to be able to try such tools.
To conclude, we were discussing when to choose an off-the-shelf (OTS) magnetic or a customized one. I saved my answer for my Tech-Talk.
After the panel discussion, I gave a talk on how to design a customized Flyback for laptop chargers, and at the end, I asked the audience... typically, we've seen the comparison between OTS vs. Custom like this:
But what if I tell you that by using technology, we can reduce custom times to days and the cost to OTS levels? Would you still use OTS magnetics?
What do you think? Looking forward to reading your comments.
Next week, I will enjoy my first Thanksgiving, so if anyone wants to give me some tips about how to celebrate this day, It would be lovely.
It wouldn't be an American Thanksgiving without somebody at least attempting to watch some football. (The American kind, with the quarterbacks and giant padding and helmets.)
Also you didn't do it right unless you need to be rolled upstairs into bed, or more accurately, you fall asleep on the couch with your top pants button undone.
Best of luck!