best book to get started in ac/dc smps power supply design

it depends on your level of knowledge.

Marty Brown's book is pretty good, as is Abraham Pressmans (although his maths is designed to be as confusing as possible). Personally I like Keith Billings book, it has a great deal of info on magnetics design, which is an area most people dont know much about.

IMNSHO anything published by TAB books is a joke, suitable only for hobbyists who specifically dont want to know whats really going on.

Cheers Terry

Say Terry,

What I know about switchers and magnetics design came mostly from Pressman. I discovered Marty's book later, and thought the 1st edition was a little too "cookbookish" -- albeit with coverage of more contemporary topics than Pressman, who still spent a lot of time talking about 20kHz switching. :-) Marty added some significant "meat" for the second edition, though... I think it's pretty good now.

I don't have a copy of Billings' book.

But what I wanted to ask was... do you have a copy of the combined Pressman/Billings 3rd edition of "Switching Power Supply Design?" (My understanding is that the publisher called in Billings to expound upon Pressman's 2nd edition after Pressman died.) If so, how does it compare to either book alone?

I cringe whenever I attend a seminar aimed mainly digital guys and they start talking about how "undesirable" magnetics are. :-(

Newnes was getting a simular reputation to TAB, although they (Newnes) came up with a new brand -- Elsevier -- that seems to have a slightly higher standard. (Although they did accept Tim Wescott's tome, but there's no accounting for taste. Just kidding, Tim!)

---Joel

yeah it is a bit that way. Anything JD Lenk writes should be avoided for that reason. Cookbook = "neither understand nor think"

I have these:

Billings, 1st ed. Pressman, 2nd ed. Brown, 2nd ed. SMPS simulation with SPICE3, Sandler Switch Mode Power Conversion, K. Kit Sum One by Gottlieb, published by TAB - I have learned my lesson, the book is a joke. Principles of Inverter Circuits, Bedford & Hoft Power Electronics 2nd ed, Lander High Frequency Switching Power Supplies, Chryssis Switching Power Converters, Wood Power supplies for electronic equipment vols 1&2, Nowicki (old but great) Dynamic Analysis of Switching mode dc/dc converters, Redl, Sokal et al (fabulous method injection-absorbed current analysis) Resonant power converters, kazimierczuk Power Electronics 1st ed, Mohan undeland & robbins Design of solid-state power supplies 2nd ed, Hnatek SMPS design & optimization, maniktala (this is pretty good) Transistor inverters & converters, Roddam Severns & Blooms book Mitchells book

If there are any I am missing, let me know ;)

nope, and I only have the 1st ed. of Billings - I bought it in Australia in about 1990, and its been worth its weight in gold. and more.

LOL. At uni I learned this:

1st year: V = LdI/dt 2nd year: use opamp active filters 3rd year: use switched-cap filters 4th year: DSP

and that was it. Luckily about 2 months into my first engineering job designing motor controllers I went to a week-long Magnetics seminar by Rudy Severns. Smartest thing I ever did.

Its interesting designing stuff here in NZ. If it is to be made locally, I try to replace magnetics with silicon as its cheaper. If it is made in China, the converse is true. my latest smps has a pair of coupled-inductor buck converters - I get 20dB less ripple by adding a tiny KoolMu core and 4 x 10uF 10V X7R caps. And I have far lower losses in the inductor, as I steer all the ripple current into one winding so the other sees 10Adc, and can thus be the biggest wire we can fit in the hole. yay.

I did an EMC consulting job 2 yrs ago in China, where the digital guys had run amok splitting up 0V planes with large 1uH 6A ferrite beads (inductors up to several MHz). We recently hired one of those guys, who has been told he will be stabbed repeatedly if he so much as touches an inductor. Good FPGA guy though :)

I just finished reading a couple of great books:

- Guns, Rockets & Targets - a summary of US efforts during WWII

- Electromechanical Transducers & Wave filters. Brilliant!

- Exploding Wires vol. 1 & 2. Now I know how to set off nukes :)

- High Power optically activated solid state switches - brilliant! these are impressive, megavolt kilo- or mega-amp switches. Basically a honking great block of semiconductor with terminals at either end, which they thump with stupidly large laser pulses (10kW, that sort of thing), essentially mondo (mongo?) photodiodes. I want one! I wonder if I can trigger an IGBT with a laser? I should tear a module apart and try it....so many things to fiddle with, so few of them I get paid for :(

Cheers Terry

PS glad you enjoyed my CAD post ;)

I

The TI/Unitrode notes by Lloyd H Dixon are very good for magnetics, they are somewhere on their website, but hard to find, perhaps try

for a start. Or you get them by searching within their website for sem100 (that was 1983) up to sem 1700 (2006/7)

It's well worth doing one of Ray Ridley's seminars if he's still running them, and he has a lot of good app notes on

It's also worth checking out

I

I have those too, in hardcopy.

Bruce Carstens are a lot better. I have been to a couple of RRs, and IMO he tends to leave out a lot of stuff (eg loop compensation in real detail) and I found them to be oriented towards selling his products (power456 etc). hardly surprising.

Working for a couple of years with Dean Venable is also a great way to learn about control loops etc.

Thanks. I downloaded BWWs free book from there, and had fun going thru the bibliography. Its scary how many of those books I have :)

Cheers Terry