Faster power supply unit tests with PXIe

Dec. 17, 2014 - PRLog -- Quality control plays a decisive role when manufacturing power supply units.Power supply unit malfunctions can result in expensive subsequent damages or product recalls.Malfunctions for important parameters such as rise time, voltage stability or power-on delay are ideally recognised and resolved directly in the production process.Fast PXIe digitizers such as the PXIe 9848 card from Acceed can provide valuable support as PXI system components.

Normally, manufacturers use measurement systems which are complex in their structures, are both costly and space-intense and hardly flexible. The disadvantage of most systems is that the power supply units to be tested can only be examined successively, one after another. The modular structure of a PC-based PXI system enables power supply unit tests to be accelerated effectively, production time and costs are reduced.

The digitizers are the most important part of a PXI measurement system, they convert the analogue measurement signals to digital values. With the PXIe 9848, the independent industry distributor Acceed presents a fast PXIe card with a high input bandwidth of 100 MHz, a sampling rate of 100 megasamples per second and a 14 bit sampling depth. That means that this digitizer is not only ideally suited for testing power modules, but also for example for the quality control of devices for optical spacing and speed measurement.

The input voltage range can be adjusted variably via the software. The supported Direct Memory Access allows connected peripheral devices to communicate directly with the working memory without the detour via the CPU. The advantage of this technology is the fast data transfer whilst simultaneously easing the burden on the processor. The PXIe 9848 supports the operating systems Windows 7, Windows 8 and Linux and the standard programs LabVIEW, MATLAB, Visual Studio and Visual Studio.NET used in test environments.