Green Plug to Debut Green Power Processor ‘Demo Kit’ in Q2
Despite showing “strong interest” at CES in Green Plug’s Green Power Processor (GPP), CE makers “still remain skeptical” because any cost “is too much cost,” a Green Plug executive said. The GPP is an advanced system-on-chip that enables CE makers to design digital power adapter architectures that save energy by easing communication between the power source and the connected device, the company said. Green Plug had more than 40 meetings with CE executives at CES at which no one denied “the fact that digital control will replace analog control,” said Paul Panepinto, the company’s vice president of ecosystem development. “The question is at what point in time."
Industry executives were “encouraged” by projections that the new processor in “high volume could be even sub one dollar,” which is “in line with the pricing they now pay for analog control,” Panepinto told our affiliated newsletter Green Electronics Daily. But they want to see a demonstration of the energy savings that the chip can produce, he said. The GPP is going into a “development board” and from there to a “some advanced power supply design,” he said. “But the challenge is that there is no such thing as an apples to apples comparison of the energy efficiency improvements you are going to get,” he said. That’s because a GPP chip in a state-of-the-art, conventional external power supply that runs on an analog chip is only going to perform at about the same level as the analog chip, he said. But “if you make the design optimized for digital, it is going to then leverage that capability and should perform better,” Panepinto said.
"We have a CE vendor audience that’s hopeful that this new technology has met the price point that they need and that it will offer additional functionality to improve energy savings and efficiency,” he said. But they won’t be able to see that until “they put up the best of their power supplies, and we put up the best of ours and do the measurement.” Green Plug plans to bring out a GPP “demo kit” in the second quarter and “we expect to be working with a few select vendors doing some of our measurements and we hope to publish some results by June or July,” he said.
Panepinto said he believes CE makers have gotten over safety and reliability concerns with the GPP. “There were more fears of having an interoperable open-system universal power interface,” he said. Device makers have now come to understand that while they could make the adapter with the GPP chip universal, they don’t have to. “They can restrict the use of any power source to their own product,” he said. “They can choose to not accept power from anything they haven’t preauthorized.” CE makers were concerned that someone was going to plug in a $10 power supply made overseas into their “wonderful product” and cause a problem, and “they didn’t want to deal with that.”
As for GPP’s energy savings potential, Green Plug has some “theoretical models” now that show that “savings can be significant,” Panepinto said. But his company hopes to do measurements with vendors in the second quarter, he said. Green Plug is now working with the U.K.’s Pure Digital Radio and hopes to have the GPP chips in Pure products by the end of 2011, he said. “We also hope to engage with one or two major vendors in some design products this year but you won’t see products introduced [with GPP] until late in 2012.” He declined to name the CE makers.