Linear Technology Corporation (LLTC)

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EDN Innovation Award Presented for Linear Technology Power Device

April 28, 2008 09:30 AM Eastern Daylight Time
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MILPITAS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Linear Technology Corporation (Nasdaq:LLTC) today announced that EDN magazine has selected Linear’s LT3080 three-terminal parallelable low dropout linear regulator as EDN’s Innovation of the Year in the Power ICs category. The award was presented at the annual EDN Innovation Awards ceremony this month in San Jose, California to Linear Technology Vice President Engineering and Chief Technical Officer Robert Dobkin and Design Engineer Todd Owen, who developed the product.

“Every year the difficulty of technical challenges increases, the pressures of schedule, cost, and energy efficiency grow, and the resources available to design teams dwindle. That makes the achievements of this year’s EDN Innovation Award winners all the more impressive,” stated Ron Wilson, executive director of EDN Worldwide. “Selected by their peers in the design community for their outstanding results, these innovators stand in the front rank of the best and brightest electronics engineering has to offer.”

Robert Dobkin, CTO of Linear Technology, stated, “The LT3080 solves two difficult problems for linear regulators: spreading heat to eliminate heat sinks and increasing output current by simply adding additional devices. The circuit architecture is completely new and just as easy to use as older devices. I am proud to introduce this product.”

The LT3080 is a 1.1A three-terminal linear regulator that can easily be paralleled for heat spreading and higher output current, and is adjustable to zero with a single resistor. This is a new architecture for regulators and uses a current reference and voltage follower to allow sharing between multiple regulators, enabling multiamp linear regulation in all surface-mount systems without heat sinks.

The LT3080 has a wide input voltage capability of 1.2V to 40V, a dropout voltage of only 300mV and millivolt regulation. The output voltage is adjustable, spanning a wide range from 0V to 40V, and the on-chip trimmed reference achieves high accuracy of ±1%. The LT3080 really shines in generating multirail systems.

As a historical note, the LT3080 is a significant refinement of the industry-standard three-terminal linear regulators first developed by Robert Dobkin over 30 years ago. The new LT3080 device allows designers more flexibility in designing the power portion of their systems most simply and with optimal spreading of heat across the board.

Since the introduction of the LT3080 last year, there has been significant customer interest across a wide range of system applications.

About EDN and EDN.com

EDN serves the vital information needs of design engineers and engineering managers worldwide. EDN.com delivers a three-dimensional view of the electronics industry via news coverage, strategic business information, and in-depth technical content. (www.edn.com) EDN is published by Reed Business Information (www.reedbusiness.com/us), the largest business-to-business publisher in the U.S. and a member of the Reed Elsevier Group plc (NYSE: RUK and ENL) – a world-leading publisher and information provider.

About the EDN Innovation Awards

EDN was the first to create an award honoring people, products, and technologies that have shaped the electronics industry. The EDN Innovation Awards program also nurtures the growth of engineering careers and the future of electronics by donating a portion of the proceeds from the Innovation Awards ceremony to an engineering university selected by the Innovator of the Year. (www.EDN.com/innovation18)

About Linear Technology

Linear Technology Corporation, a manufacturer of high performance linear integrated circuits, was founded in 1981, became a public company in 1986 and joined the S&P 500 index of major public companies in 2000. Linear Technology products include high performance amplifiers, comparators, voltage references, monolithic filters, linear regulators, DC-DC converters, battery chargers, data converters, communications interface circuits, RF signal conditioning circuits, and many other analog functions. Applications for Linear Technology’s high performance circuits include telecommunications, cellular telephones, networking products such as optical switches, notebook and desktop computers, computer peripherals, video/multimedia, industrial instrumentation, security monitoring devices, high-end consumer products such as digital cameras and MP3 players, complex medical devices, automotive electronics, factory automation, process control, and military and space systems. For more information, visit www.linear.com.

Note: LT and LTC are registered trademarks of Linear Technology Corporation.
Contacts

Linear Technology Corporation
John Hamburger, 408-432-1900 ext. 2419
Director, Marketing Communications
[e-mail]
www.linear.com

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