It’s Time to Make the "Black Box" of High Voltage Power Supplies Easy to Understand

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines the word transparent as “free from pretense or deceit.” Following that, transparency is said to be “the quality or state of being transparent.” At Advanced Energy, we’ve decided to develop another definition for transparency: “an open and easy to understand representation of the capabilities of a product.”

Here’s why: Design and integration quality of a product are paramount to our customers achieving their optimum system performance. Having to weed through complex data sheets or exhaustive lists of performance specifications doesn’t really help make the selection process easy – it wastes valuable time and money.

No Surprises

Before integrating a high voltage power supply into an environment, system designers will typically test the supply to eliminate one of their least wanted events: THE SURPRISE. But what if the high voltage power supply vendor was already knowledgeable about the application and clearly defined the performance specs so that the designer could reduce the amount of testing required?

For example, design engineers new to high voltage power modules might see a data sheet that lists the high voltage output range as 0 to 10 kV DC, but not realize that its topology isn’t designed to deliver the quoted performance over the lowest 10% of its output range (this is common). This may or may not be clearly explained. The goal here is to have clear documentation that produces NO SURPRISES.

Be Successful Sooner

The benefits of being clear all come down to being successful sooner. The last thing wanted – whether for bias supplies, capacitor charging, electrophoresis, mass spectrometry, scanning electron microscopy or a multitude of other applications – is a set of ambiguous information that slows down product development.

As engineers developing solutions for engineers, we know that when you have confidence in the high voltage power supply, you can concentrate on other critical design goals such as performance, reliability and cost.