Support grows for universal power adapter

Tag : DC DC Adapter

A technology that could help the environment by eliminating theneed to ship a power adapter with every electronics device got avote of confidence Friday from consumer electronics makerWestinghouse Digital Electronics.

Westinghouse said it had committed to using a smart powertechnology developed by a start-up company, Green Plug, that aimsto let people use a single "universal adapter" to power theirlaptops, cell phones and other electronics gear.

Most products today ship with a custom adapter that converts ACpower from a wall socket into the correct DC power required foreach device. Green Plug's technology allows each device tocommunicate its individual power requirements to the power adapter,allowing several devices to share one adapter.

The technology's success depends partly on getting support fromelectronics manufacturers, who will need to embed Green Plug'sfirmware into their devices so that they can send their powerrequirements to the adapter. That's why Westinghouse's support issignificant.

"We know we're not the largest [electronics company] but we are thefirst, and somebody has to be first," said Darwin Chang, CTO ofWestinghouse, which makes LCD televisions, computer monitors, anddigital photo frames.

Besides helping the environment, the Green Plug technology willalso help Westinghouse to cut its costs, Chang said. Eventually itcould stop shipping power adapters with its products becausecustomers will already have a universal adapter at home, he said.

Each adapter will act like a hub that several devices can pluginto. The first are expected to go on sale in the first quarternext year for under $100, Chang said. The adapters also will shutoff the power supply when a device has finished charging or isturned off, giving further energy savings.

It remains to be seen whether other electronics vendors will followsuit. Green Plug also needs semiconductor makers to build itstechnology into chips that will go into the universal adapters.Green Plug CEO Frank Paniagua said his company already has onechip-maker on board, though he won't say yet who it is.
Westinghouse made its announcement at the second meeting of theAlliance for Universal Power Supplies, a group comprisingelectronics vendors, power supply makers, utility companies andothers promoting standard power systems to reduce e-waste andinefficiency. The meeting in San Francisco was attended byrepresentatives from Fujitsu, Motorola, Intel and Broadcom, amongothers.

The stakes for the environment are high. More than 3 billion poweradapters will be shipped worldwide this year, up from 2.2 billionjust three years ago, according to Greg Lefebre of theenvironmental consultancy ESS. The growth has been driven by theproliferation of devices like cell phones, MP3 players and digitalcameras.
A whopping 434 million consumer electronics devices are "retired"in the U.S. each year, Lefebre said, including 130 million cellphones. In many cases those products, along with their chargers andpower adapters, end up in landfills, he said.

Some vendors don't have an incentive to eliminate unique powersupplies and connector cables, because they get supplementaryrevenue stream from selling replacements, Lefebre noted. He citedApple, which uses a proprietary connector for the iPod, as a primeexample.

There are other hurdles too. Code Cubitt of Motorola Ventures,speaking on a panel here, said product managers are fixated onproviding a good "out of the box" experience. If the company shipsa product without an adapter, and the consumer doesn't have auniversal adapter at home, it creates a bad impression of thecompany.
Another issue is liability. If a company ships a product and aconsumer plugs it into another vendor's universal adapter and itstarts a house fire, all the parties involved could find themselvesin court. That problem will be lessened if the product vendor canshow it conformed to an industry standard, said Armando Castro ofthe law firm Morgan, Lewis & Bockius.

In China, where 500 million cell phones were manufactured lastyear, the government has regulated that all cell phone chargers,including those imported, have a standard USB interface and outputvoltage, so consumers don't need a new one with every new phone.

Such regulations are unlikely in the U.S., but if the industrydoesn't get its act together then the federal government may startto intervene in some way, speakers here said.
Green Plug offers its firmware to electronics makers for free sothey can make their devices support its power specification, and ithopes to make money by licensing the technology to chip-makers. Thecost to vendors to include the technology in each device will beabout $2, Paniagua said.