The reliability of board-mounted dc/dc converters is important to understand and quantify. It’s a measure of the frequency of system or device failures as a function of time. Reliability is the observed failure rate and is defined as either the time between two failures (in hours), called the Mean Time Between Failures (MTBF), or the […]
EMC/EMI design and the use of board-mount dc/dc converters
Electromagnetic compatibility (EMC) and electromagnetic interference (EMI) are system-level considerations that have implications for power system design, especially when multiple board-mounted dc/dc converters are used in a distributed power architecture (DPA). EMC/EMI is a multidimensional consideration and includes differential- and common-mode noise on both the input and output of the converter radiated and conducted noise […]
Thermal management considerations for board-mounted dc/dc converters
System-level thermal design is equally important to the electrical specifications of board-mounted dc/dc converters. And the growing use of variations on a distributed power architecture (DPA) increases the complexity of thermal design. A single multiple-output ac/dc power supply is used to power the various loads in a conventional power architecture. The use of a centralized […]
PMBus® update, what changes lie ahead? Virtual Interview, part 1 of 2
We are here today with Bob White, the originator of the PMBus® power management protocol, long time chair of the PMBus specification working group, and current editor of the PMBus and SMBus specifications. Bob is the principal author of the PMBus specifications and continues to participate in the PMBus Specification Working Group. He is a […]
Specifying board-mounted dc/dc converters
The specification of board-mounted dc-dc converters is an important and detailed process. Correctly implemented, it results in a cost-effective solution that meets all the needs of the application. Incorrectly specified dc/dc converters can result in a more costly device than necessary and/or a device that is not suited for the application. This FAQ will review […]
Power system design considerations for wireless IoT nodes and wearables – Virtual Roundtable (part 2)
The second part of EEWorld’s two-part “virtual roundtable” discussion on power system design considerations for wireless IoT nodes and wearables focuses on the use of switching regulators and the associated technical challenges. Our panelists are: Florian Feckl (FF), Systems Engineer and Product Definer for Low Power Buck Converter, Texas Instruments, and Kyle Van Renterghem, (KVR) […]
Power system design considerations for wireless IoT nodes and wearables – Virtual Roundtable (part 1)
The first part of EEWorld’s two-part “virtual roundtable” discussion on power system design considerations for wireless IoT nodes and wearables focuses on the use of low dropout regulators (LDOs). Our panelists are Kyle Van Renterghem, (KVR) Marketing & Applications Manager, Low Input Voltage LDOs, Texas Instruments, and Julian Hagedorn (JH), Systems Engineer, Texas Instruments. JS: […]
Liquid cooling for high-performance thermal management
Liquid cooling comes in two forms, cold-plate based systems, and immersion cooling systems. Cold plate liquid cooling is found in various high-performance applications, including energy storage, transportation, electric vehicles, photonics, LEDs, military and industrial power supply cooling, even in some over-clocked desktop computers. The use of immersion cooling is more limited, and it can be […]
Forced air cooling keeps cool with fans and blowers
Natural convection cooling is often inadequate to meet the thermal management needs of electronic systems. In those cases, fans and blowers can move more air and keep the system within a safe operating temperature range. As well as being available in both ac and dc configurations, fans are generally categorized by the way the air […]
Convection cooling components
Convection cooling is used in various devices, from mobile phone handsets to various consumer, communications, and industrial systems where the thermal loading is not too demanding. Devices such as heatsinks, heat spreaders, and heat pipes are used to implement convection cooling. Convection cooling systems are often classified as either passive or active. Active cooling systems […]
