The kit can be used by digital engineers to help them better understand PMBus technologies for the digital control of power supplies as well as the more efficient development of almost any power topology combination including voltage, current or customised control.
It was developed in collaboration with Biricha Digital, which designed the buck converter board using the free-for-download DesignSpark PCB design software, and Würth Elektronik, which provided connectors and passive components including high-performance inductors and capacitors intended specifically for digital power control applications.
The kit also features two Infineon ARM Cortex-M based XMC-microcontroller control cards, as well as the company’s DAVE v4 IDE software development platform for XMC microcontrollers, which is a free-of-charge code-generation system.
Intended for applications such as industrial, telecom and server power conversion, the kit is intended to help digital and power engineers bridge the growing technology gap that is currently hindering the creation of digital power control solutions.
The main board of the kit includes a synchronous buck DC/DC converter with on-board resistive load banks, which can be switched between 10%, 55% and 100% of the maximum load to enable the testing of the transient response and the quality of the control loop under different load conditions, such as continuous-conduction versus discontinuous-conduction mode. Voltage-mode and peak-current-mode control with slope compensation are also available for the user to experiment.
The kit also includes two of Infineon’s XMCTM range of ARM Cortex-M microcontrollers, OptiMOSTM BSC0924NDI MOSFETs, and IRS2011S high- and low-side drivers. The control card options are an ARM Cortex-M0 based XMC1300 control card and an ARM Cortex-M4F XMC4200 control card with isolated on-board debugger, which allow designers to easily evaluate both XMC microcontroller families. The XMC4200 has high-resolution PWM (150ps) and smart-analogue comparators. Multiple test points are provided on the power board to check the quality of all relevant signals, and a communication option via PMBus is provided for easy integration into more complex power management systems.
The Infineon XMC Digital Power Explorer Kit is now available to order from RS.