DDR4 Design Considerations - EEWeb

EEWeb PULSE SPECIAL FEATURE
As the company has grown, Magna-Power has
brought more and more processes in house for
manufacturing power. “We believe that vertical
integration allows us to not only maintain higher quality,”
Pitel told us, “but also control lead times and also our
costs involved.” One of the major things about these
programmable power products is that they’re all
configurable, meaning that they are built to order with
the standard models also offered. “Today, at Magna-
Power, we do all of our own transformer and inductor
winding,” Pitel explained. “We have our own sheet metal
operations, we do power coating, we manufacture our own
heatsinks, we do PCB assemblies, we even manufacture
our own magnetic cores for our transformers…” and the
list goes on.
SL Series
The latest product from Magna-Power is the SL series
product, which provides programmable DC power from
1.5, 2.6, and 4 KW in a 1U package. The SL series is a
power supply that pushes the density and power into
a single 1U package. Pitel stated that, “Magna-Power
has made a significant leap in the available 1U power
density for programmable DC power supplies.” With
Magna-Power’s growth, the company has broken into
a market where there are a lot more applications with a
significantly higher volume. “It’s really required us to scale
up our resources and get to a point where we can build
a 1U product and really make a splash,” Pitel explained.
SL Specs
The SL series has a variety of models that are all single
output DC power supplies. There are 70 different models
available with voltage ranges from 0 to 5 volts, up to 0 to
1,000 volts. It also has a current range from 1.5 amps to 250
amps, so there is a broad spectrum of different voltages
and currents available. Just last year, Magna-Power
introduced a high accuracy controller to provide highly
accurate measurements for these supplies. Pitel recalled
being on site with a client and his response to seeing
external power meters taking all of their measurements;
“I told them that they’re spending a small fortune on
coupling power meters with every single power supply.”
The client told Pitel that they were doing so because the
accuracy from programmable DC power supplies just
wasn’t high enough. Magna-Power responded directly to
this problem. “In our latest generation of products,” Pitel
told us, “we increased our programming accuracy nearly
10-fold—it’s now +/- 0.075% for both voltage and current.”
“In our latest generation of products,” Pitel told us, “we
increased our programming accuracy nearly 10-fold.”
Controlling the Device
Every power supply from Magna-Power comes with three
ways of programming it. One way is by using the front
panel control knobs, which is for very basic operations.
Another way is by using the 37 isolated analog and digital
I/Os, so users can program it from an analog 10V signal
and tie it in with a PLC. These supplies also come with
a computer interface as well, which offers LXI-certified
TCP/IP Ethernet and IEEE 488 GPIB. Recently, Magna-
Power certified its products with the new LXI 1.4 standard,
which supports the same mDNS standard that Apple
made popular with Bonjour.
If developers want to integrate controlling one of these
devices into a customized software they have developed,
Magna-Power also provides support for interfacing the
programming languages. “We invested quite a bit into
developing IVI drivers,” Pitel stated, “which is basically
a universal driver that is supported in a wide variety of
different programming environments.” These different
environments include LabView, LabWindows, and Visual
Studio, providing a full command set for the power supply.
Users can access all of those commands in the power
supply and any of these programming environments,
which is made simple using the IVI driver.
All of Magna-Power’s power supplies under 1,000 volts
come with remote sense functionality, so users can hook
up load wires and have a high impedance remote sense
line to attach as well. Pitel told us that the leadless remote
sense function is becoming very popular among their
customers. “Consider an application where someone is
powering an underwater vehicle and they have a 1,000foot
cable powering it up, which can be pretty daunting.
The nice thing is, you can have a 1,000-foot cable and
have the impedance known through the leadless remote
sense function.” Conveniently enough, if the user knows
the impedance of the cable, they can compensate for that
automatically within the power supply.
Magna-Power’s various programmable power devices
seem to directly respond to the customer’s needs. Whether
it’s hearing about user’s problems from being on-site or by
analyzing the current limitations of programmable power
devices on the market today, Magna-Power pushes the
limits of power devices so that they’re one step ahead
of the rest. ■
16 EEWeb | Electrical Engineering Community
Visit www.eeweb.com
17