Troubleshooting Switching Power Converters By Sanjaya Maniktala

Troubleshooting Switching Power Converters By Sanjaya Maniktala

Contents:

Chapter 1: Thinking Power

Chapter 2: High-Frequency Effects and the Importance of Input Decoupling

Chapter 3: Output Noise and Filtering

Chapter 4: Using Capacitors Wisely

Chapter 5: Maximizing the Effectiveness of the Ground Plane

Chapter 6: Printed Circuit Board Layout for AC-DC and DC-DC Converters

Chapter 7: Working without a Ground Plane

Chapter 8: Home-Grown Strategies in Troubleshooting

Chapter 9: Effective Bench Work

Chapter 10: Efficiency Rules

Chapter 11: Magnetics, EMI, and Noise

Chapter 12: Discussion Forums, Datasheets, and Other Real-World Issues

Preface:

A few weeks ago, I found myself groping for some sorely needed inspiration. I was even questioning the very need for a book on this particular subject. So despite spending five years in the general vicinity of the legend behind it, I fi nally went and bought myself the “other” book—Troubleshooting Analog Circuits by Robert Pease. I am glad I did, because it ended up fulfilling both my requirements—I not only learned that his book is truly is an inspiring resource (certainly something to chuckle your way through coach class with pretzels and coffee in hand), but also that it isn’t about Power Conversion. Take, for example, that famous picture on its cover. The hopelessly entangled object you see there (the creation, not the creator) apparently served as a historic V-F (voltage-to-frequency)

converter circuit. But really, it would never pass muster as even a basic switching converter. Breadboards, for one, are kryptonite to switching converters. If you really think about it, all that that picture so aptly conveys is exactly what you shouldn’t ever be attempting to do in power. Reassuringly, even that book itself recognizes that “switch-mode regulators [are] a whole new ball-game.” So it was surprising for me to learn that the analog troubleshooting book was originally

intended to be just a single chapter of a much larger volume on the topic of switching power converters. Maybe that project just slipped through the cracks of time. Perhaps it was too difficult a venture to undertake—a hypothesis somewhat supported by the fact that there is still virtually no other book out there on this topic (cheers to the book you’re holding, by the way!). But I also tend to believe that if it were published in the format it seems to have been originally conceived in, it could well have turned out to be quite misleading—for reasons very similar to that on the cover of the analog book. For a while, that had me seriously thinking: “whose bright idea was that?” Then I realized that back in those days, Power Conversion was still in its infancy. Who knew what lay ahead? In the early 1970s, the Intel 8080 microprocessor was dazzling engineers around the world with its blazing computational speed of 2MHz! “Digital” became the anthem for a new