There is no doubt that future power supplies will be digitally controlled. It is now a question of whether the market will adopt digital power quickly or whether it will take time to overcome the associated technical challenges – or ‘fear factors’ – of performance, reliability and complexity.
Digitally controlled power supplies are not new; microcontrollers have been used for some time, mainly for supervisory, monitoring and diagnostic purposes. A true digital power supply, however, features a digital control loop, rather than the traditional analogue control loop.
Whilst analogue controllers have a good reputation in terms of bandwidth, resolution and ease of use, they suffer from component drift and aging, tolerance degradation and inflexibility.
Digital controllers, meanwhile, are insensitive to temperature drift and enable new features, providing the ability to create software programmable and flexible solutions with precise and predictable behaviour.
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