Implementing a new electronics system design is always a trade-off between wants and needs, risks vs reward. Your primary directive is to make sure the Marketing Requirements Document (MRD) is met or adhered to. Assessing new technologies quickly and in a sufficiently detailed manner is fundamental to the decision-making process when designing solutions.
Ideally, new support components for the solution would be updated to accommodate greater efficiency reliability, solution density, cost savings, and reduce the possibility of supply constraints.
Do you have limited time and bench resources? Is this impacting the opportunity as an engineer to assess all your options? It is frustrating to see the lost opportunity spent on wasted resources of ‘dusty evaluation boards’. Designing, building, testing, and shipping (often hand-delivered) is expensive and resources are valuable.
The Power Alliance along with many semiconductor manufacturers are good examples of where the industry is taking proactive steps to advance both the interests of engineers and suppliers. An example of LoadSlammers being used today can be seen on this ASIC evaluation board.
By using LoadSlammer technology fast and thorough evaluations of regulator solutions can be assessed.
The LoadSlammer family of products offers fast AC and DC measurements to be taken. When measured in conjunction with large signal AC Stimuli, also known as ‘Transient Load Testing’, a sophisticated understanding of the behavior of a vendor solution can be established before implementing it into a system.
Because LoadSlammer is vendor agnostic and mobile, fair comparisons can be made against various solutions quickly and accurately.
After choosing and implementing a solution, you the engineer can then (close the loop) pun intended on the design cycle by optimizing the finished solution. PID/compensation variables can be tuned for the final product. Using the LoadSlammer API allows third-party GUI’s to test and optimize with minimal interaction.
Roger Beeston is CEO of LoadSlammer and has spent his career designing and selling electronic systems with a focus on power supplies for advanced silicon products. Having been a design engineer for many years he is familiar with the difficulty of implementing new technology under budget and on time. He and his team developed the LoadSlammer with the intent of bridging the gap between engineers and suppliers by providing consistent test information between different vendors’ solutions.
