SMART ALGORITHM TRIPLES SERVICE LIFE OF POWER SUPPLIES

It appears to be about the use of film capacitors. There was a pretty serious set of (expensive) film caps visible in the Tesla Model 3 inverter teardown.

We have done something similar, at least the technique of using film caps

We boosted the loop bandwidth by 5 times of a power supply by carefully cha nging the circuit around the regulator IC. Thus we could reduce the bulk ca pacity many fold

In this article they seem to be talking about predictive feed forward contr ol, so tighten the excursion during load steps

Nothing new about that, 100 dreds of papers about that, many stating ? ?Novel?. Novel = shitty ?

I normally skip any article with Novel in the headline

Cheers

Klaus

Did this mean you had to raise the switching frequency by 5x? Can you give us some more juicy details?

What I got was they are replacing the electrolytic capacitors with film capacitors, as big electrolytics in power supplies do have a limited lifetime. And, the trick must be to make it work with a lot less capacitance.

Jon

ps

In most electronics, electrolytic caps determines the lifetime, so for a st epdown converter we changed the output caps to film, thus for same cost, bu t 10x lifetime, we needed much lower capacitance. Stability can be achieved by speeding up the feedback loop, speeding up the opto i the FB path (don e by cascoding it), tricking the FB circuit inside the controller, also by cascoding it

This also has an effect on the startup behavior, since the output will ramp up much faster. So secondary compensator needs to be fast also. Lastly, wh en smaller caps are used, load changes has no energy storage, so they propa gate faster to the primary side, so OCP may need to be redesigned, since a normal converter allows for short time overload

Cheers

Klaus

Cheers

Klaus