A piece of wire and a diode can reduce huge cost
Today we will discuss one very useful trick to improve and reduce the overall cost and reliability of a popular unit in the motor control industry. As we all know, as depicted in figure -1, a standard topology of a fractional motor controllers electronics consists of, 1-ϕ AC input, step-down transformer, bridge rectifier and linear regulators to supply the drivers and micro-controller. [1] Normally bus voltage is in the range of 40VDC of delivery current at 5A to 15A. I have seen this standard implementation in almost 80% of motor drives I’ve come across. There is nothing wrong with this configuration ...
Next Generation Motor Drives
Over the last decade, the semiconductor industry has made great advancements at the component level, especially in power handling capacity, speed and compact size. Due to availability of right power electronics and logic controllers, motor Drives [1] controllers have significantly progressed achieving tighter motion control and increased reliability to different motor types. However Brush-less DC Motors (BLDC) are becoming the preferred choice for low to medium power needs due to its mechanical reliability. There are many popular electronic products out there using BLDC drives that are not updated to the latest innovations in microprocessor, power electronics and motor control loop algorithms. ...
Circuit Design for Reliability Part 3
Continuing the Circuit Design [1] & reliability discussion, we will focus on the importance of component selection and board layout in this Blog. There are three major factors designers need to keep in mind while selecting the components: input bias current, input offset voltage and noise figures. [2] Let’s say the circuit is for audio applications and the op-amp is TL072 selected for low noise and wide bandwidth, running on supply voltages of +/-12V. The TL072 has a maximum quoted Vos of 10mV. With a gain of 1000, this will be amplified by a closed loop gain to give a dc ...
Board on Board with Ventilation Tunnels
Over the past two years, we have been seeing some really innovative and high Tech PCB layouts. One case in general, was a Board Design that incorporated multiple ventilation tunnels within the layer structure of a Board on Board application. What is Board on board? The application was to mount 4 pieces of laminate together, with ventilation tunnels, over the top of a Double sided Board without air leakage between the layers. Our biggest obstacle was to figure out how not to fill the vent tunnels with pre-preg during the lamination process. After reviewing this Design, our staff came up ...
Reverse Engineering – PC Boards
Ironically, many companies come to us not to reverse engineer a competitors product, but to reverse engineer their own designs, because they have poor or no documentation on their product, because their contract manufacturers refuses to release it, or because they have lost a key employee or very old legacy product without documentation. If you have lost the design data of your legacy product, we can reverse engineer it from pictures, print-outs of the pc boards or scan copy of schematic or gerbers plots. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel again. Reasons for reverse engineering a product: Manufacturer of a product ...