From Power Management to Energetic Intelligence: an evolutionary challenge for students and educators

Power Management Circuits and Systems provide electrical energy to all the objects making our life more comfortable, safer and funnier, like smart phones and watches, aircraft and automobiles, implanted prostheses and magnetic resonance machines, blenders and microwave ovens, robots and drones, digital TV sets and personal computers. The Design of Power Management Circuits and Systems is an exciting intellectual dare for students and educators, as it stimulates insight of interdisciplinary knowledge, understanding of new technologies, exploration of unconventional design solutions, discovery of the power of mathematics, reinforcement of problem solving capability, intelligent use of the energy and ultimately preservation of the environment and of the Earth's resources. Power Management Circuits and Systems have today to implement much more enhanced energy processing functions than in the past, thus bridging power designers into the era of Energetic Intelligence. University education has to coherently enhance, to proactively drive this evolution and to guide talented students towards the achievement of new ambitious professional skills. The seminar intends to overview power management design issues and to propose a vision of the knowledge and tools needed to win the challenges of Energetic Intelligence.
Nicola Femia is Full Professor at the University of Salerno, Italy, where he teaches Power Electronics and Energetic Intelligence. His research activities encompass circuit theory and applications, design and optimization of switching power supplies, magnetic power components modeling and optimization, power electronics and control techniques for photovoltaic systems, wireless power transfer systems. He has co-authored more than 150 technical papers on power electronics topics and five patents on photovoltaic control techniques. He leads the Power Electronics and Renewable Sources Laboratory of the Computer and Electrical Engineering and Applied Mathematics Department of the University of Salerno. He has directed many research projects in collaboration with worldwide leader companies, including Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor, Power-One/ABB, On Semiconductor, Whirlpool, STMicroelectronics, Coilcraft. Since 2001 he has delivered industry Power Electronics Design and Optimization courses and seminars, in Europe and United States, in collaboration with National Semiconductor, Texas Instruments, Silica/AVNET, Coilcraft. In 2014 he has been Visiting Professor in the Electrical Engineering (EE) Department of the Stanford University, Stanford, CA, where he taught Power Electronics Control and Energy Aware Design in the EE Enhanced Master Program. He is author and co-creator of the Texas Instruments Power Management Laboratory Kit (TI-PMLK).