Estimating TV Efficiency Improvements with New Converter Architectures

Back in March we posted a blog that explained how the European Union’s eco-design legislation for electronic displays was effectively a de-facto ban on the import of the latest 8K televisions. This is because the energy that these TVs requires exceeds the legislation’s energy efficiency index (EEI), which is calculated based on screen area and power consumption.

In the blog we suggested that what was needed was a radical re-think of the power supply architectures on which these TVs are based and explained how technologies such as Eggtronic’s patented ClassEgg Zero Voltage Switching (ZVS) converter implementation, combined with wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors, could play a key role in addressing the challenge. This is because ClassEgg improves the conventional boost PFC by taking advantage of a proprietary magnetic component to ensure ZVS, lower EMI and reduced component count, offering performance and efficiencies that are higher than interleaved solutions at the cost of a standard boost PFC.

Now, in order to explore that concept further, we have performed a number of tests that compare the performance of a traditional boost PFC converter of the type used in many TVs with a gallium nitride (GaN) ClassEgg implementation. For a 400 W TV that is on for four hours a day, these comparisons show that the energy lost in the ClassEgg implementation is less than half that of the conventional design - representing a cost saving of 58%.

While hypothetical, if one were to extrapolate this saving across the world’s 1.72 billion TV sets then the annual energy saving a year would be in the region of 8.63 TWh. And this would translate into a reduction of CO₂ of 6,115,930 tons, equivalent to the emissions of 1,360,980 gasoline-powered passenger vehicles being driven for one year1.

Of course making any calculations like this needs to take account of specific use cases including the different power supply needs of different TV designs, the ratio of time spent on and the time in standby and the actual efficiency of the existing PSU implementation.

Now, to make such calculations much easier, we have created an online tool that allows designers to enter a number of different variables and understand the improvements that replacing a conventional PSU with an Eggtronic ClassEgg converter would make to their specific designs – and the potential global impact that could have on lowering energy use and cost and reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions.

For a single TV

Worldwide