There are many things I’ve not really thought about before. I don’t like to boast (I pride myself on my humility), but I bet I’ve not thought about more things than most people. One reason I say this is that I keep on being introduced to new things I’ve never even considered.
Take the power supply portion of embedded systems and the “things” part of the IoT, for example. I think it’s fair to say that this is right at the top of the list of things that rarely flits across (what I laughingly call) my mind. To be honest, I’ve always thought of power supplies as being something of a “black art.” Happily, in the case of any real-world* projects I’ve worked on, designing the power supply portion of the system has always been someone else’s problem (*as opposed to my hobby projects, in which everything is my problem).
I’m a logic design engineer by trade. The trusty 0s and 1s embodied in digital logic make me feel safe and secure. By comparison, the wibbly wobbly nature of the analog world makes me feel nervous and uncertain. So, the main issue—at least for me—is that power supply design, especially when it comes to DC-to-DC regulators, is predominantly analog. Power supply design is all about managing continuous voltages and currents, ensuring they remain stable and efficient under varying conditions. Some of the reasons for power supply design being such a big challenge for many design teams are as follows:
- Complexity of Analog Design: Unlike digital circuits, where the design process is often automated or modularized, analog design requires deep expertise. Power supply design involves selecting the right topology—whether it’s a switching regulator (buck, boost, buck-boost) or a linear regulator (including Low Dropout or LDO types)—and then carefully sizing inductors, capacitors, and other components to ensure stability, efficiency, and low noise.
- Conflicting Requirements: Power supplies need to provide precise voltages and currents under various load conditions. At the same time, they must be efficient, compact, cost-effective, and meet strict electromagnetic interference (EMI) requirements. Balancing all these factors can be daunting.
- Thermal Management: Power supplies generate heat, and inefficient designs can overheat, reducing performance and reliability. Designers need to carefully consider thermal aspects even in the early stages.
- Interference with Digital Components: Poorly designed power supplies can create noise that interferes with sensitive digital circuitry, especially in high-speed systems. Designing a clean power supply is critical for overall system performance.
- Evolving Requirements: With the drive toward smaller, battery-operated, and ultra-low-power devices, power supply designs need to keep up. Optimization is a multidimensional problem—designers need to optimize for size, weight, efficiency, and battery life, all while dealing with varying input voltages and loads.
It’s OK for those teams that can count an expert in power supply design amongst their midst—some hero who has done nothing but design power supplies for the past 30 years (I know a few of these folks myself; they’re the ones with stooped shoulders, nervous twitches and hangdog looks that rarely get invited to the best parties). The problem is that 99% of design teams don’t have someone of this ilk, in which case the three main solutions are to buy something off-the-shelf, to pay someone else to design the supply, or to spend a lot of time, effort, and money trying to come up with something themselves.
As an aside, when it comes to buying something off-the-shelf, the Latin phrase caveat emptor, meaning “let the buyer beware,” is the order of the day. As I may have mentioned, I recently purchased a couple of small, cheap-and-cheerful power supply modules that purported to be able to accept 9VDC to 36VDC as input and generate up to 5A at 5VDC as output. This seemed to be too good to be true. It was. The output voltage started to sag with a load of 1.8A and collapsed when the load reached around 2.1A (sad face). But we digress…
Last year, I wrote a column about a company called Circuit Mind (https://www.circuitmind.io/). The column in question—which I encourage you to peruse and ponder—was From Architecture to PCB Schematic in 60 Seconds!
In a crunchy nutshell, with Circuit Mind’s tools, you can use their drag-and-drop interface to capture a high-level view of your design requirements and architecture as a block diagram, and you can also specify lower-level requirements for each block, like the number of axes on an accelerometer or the data bus width of a microcontroller (all the way down to particular manufacturers, product families, or specific parts if you wish). Also, you can use slider controls to specify tradeoffs like cost, area, and power.
The real magic occurs when you click the “Go” button. In a matter of moments, you are presented with a schematic, detailed verification checks, power and area analysis, a bill of materials (BOM) and a supply chain analysis, along with the project files (schematics, symbols, and footprints) required to feed ECAD tools such as Altium Designer, Orcad, DipTrace, and more.
Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) is wonderful. I love playing with ChatGPT, for example. The only problem with GenAI is its tendency to make statistical guesses or have hallucinations (which is another way of saying “simply make things up”). Thus, you’ll be happy to know that, although the folks at Circuit Mind do use machine learning (ML) and large language model (LLM) algorithms to create their electronic component digital twin models, they do so with rigorous human supervision to ensure accuracy. When it comes to generating the designs themselves, the tools employ deterministic algorithms that are built on solid fundamental circuit design principles and crafted to operate alongside an engineer as a trustworthy source of options, results, and outcomes—so, no statistical guesses and no hallucinations (phew!).
The reason I’m waffling on about all this here is that I was just chatting with Tomide Adesanmi (Co-Founder and CEO), Basilio Gentile (Co-Founder and CTO), and Jason Baudreau (VP of Marketing) at Circuit Mind.
They reminded me that, at the time they launched the company, they were initially focused on the digital portions of designs. Now, they have added an embedded power module, which provides an additional capability within the main platform.
From architecture to power design in 60 seconds (Source: Circuit Mind)
You capture the logic portion of the design as described in my earlier column. In this case, the blocks and connections in the diagram are shown with white lines. Now, you can also add the power portion of your design—with multiple voltage rails and loads as required—in which case these blocks and connections are shown with red lines. In addition to the block diagram, you can also specify things like required efficiency and allowable voltage ripple and such-like.
The slider controls you use to specify tradeoffs like cost, area, and power apply to all aspects of the design—both logic and power. Now, when you press the “Go” button, the system generates both the logic and power portions of the design. An example of an auto-generated power architecture is shown below.
Auto-generated power architecture with required regulator blocks
(Source: Circuit Mind)
It’s important to note that the tool doesn’t look at the logic and power separately, and it doesn’t consider the power stages in isolation. Instead, it simultaneously considers upstream and downstream components (both logic and power) taking losses from stage-to-stage into account. Selecting a different microcontroller may affect the choice of one of the regulators, for example.
In addition to recommending the regulators themselves, the system also selects any necessary capacitors, inductors, and so-forth, all of which are reflected in the schematics (as shown below), the BOM, and such-like.
Power design schematics exported to Altium (in this case)
(Source: Circuit Mind)
O-M-Goodness gracious me, is all I can say. This is going to be a godsend for so many design teams. Of course, “talk is cheap,” as they say (especially when it’s me who is doing the talking). How good is this? Does it really work? How can you tell? I’m glad you asked.
You can visit https://www.circuitmind.io/ and book a demo. They’ll start by discussing your use case(s), and then they will set up a live trial. For this, they would prefer that you come equipped with a power supply design you’ve already done, because that way you already know how long it took you, how much the components cost, how good the design is, and so forth.
All you need to give them is a high-level block diagram of the power supply portion of your design. In many cases they’ll give you live access, so you’ll be the one running things with one of the Circuit Mind folks telling you what to do, thereby saving you from spending time learning the tool.
Last, but certainly not least, Tomide will be hosting a live webinar, Architecture to Power Design in 60 Seconds: A Breakthrough in AI-Driven Automation, on Tuesday 1 April 2025 at 1:00 p.m. Central Time (USA and Canada). I just registered myself (I wanted to register now to make sure I got one of the good seats). Hopefully I’ll see you there—I’ll be easy to spot because I’ll be the one asking the silly questions.
What say you? Do you have any thoughts you’d care to share on anything you’ve read here?
