🔥 That is an old war that started off when the digital era begun back in the 80s, I think. It seemed for a period that digital was going to rule 🖖, taking over the reigns from analog, which was the dominant player back then.
The digital era changed our world forever the past 3 decades. It expanded our capabilities as a human species to a degree never though before.
After the pandemic and now during the energy crisis, all countries have experienced the hunger for electric vehicles and the need for renewable energy sources is growing strong! More than ever before!
These are good news for the power electronics world 🤗.
Let’s get to the point now. What I wanted to talk about in particular is the control loop of old and new power topologies.
⚡ Digital 🆚 analog control ⚡
⚠️ I admit, my background is as analog, so I’m going to be biased in the following paragraphs 😂
As an example, let’s talk about the Phase Shifted Full Bridge that is relevant in these last newsletters. What controller chips are out there? I have in my mind the UCC28950 from Ti, and that’s it! Maybe 1-2 from other companies, but I doubt it…
In my mind that seems like a big mistake from the major companies out there!
Why don’t they roll out more controller IC for this well known, highly used topology?!
They are solving the problem by using digital real time controller MCUs. And that’s the tendency nowadays. Every new reference design is using these DSP like MCUs.
✅ Do I like it ? -> NO!
✅ Do I think I should keep up, learning new skills like that ->YES!
The reason I don’t like this trend is because there is simply very little training material out there to start learning about these real time MCUs. Let alone that you must be proficient in power electronics, control systems and embedded programming, to get a simple thing working. We had enough problems already, now we have to worry about one more thing…
So, I bought demo board for 100$ to start learning and I ended up quitting, after realizing that I could finish the lessons in the demo, but I couldn’t find out how to set up simple stuff like interrupts and simple control loops without reading 200 pages (minimum) of long, never ending, manuals 😵 (I read them and still didn’t get it…)
👎 I was expecting a steep learning curve but not that bad…
Don’t get me wrong I do use MCUs in my projects, like my favorite PSOC4/5 32 bit MCUs (Cypress-Infineon) and the classic AVR-8 bit stuff, writing firmware in C and software in C# so that there is interaction between a PC app and my board. I can say that my knowledge in embedded stuff is at a professional level, so I was expecting less difficulties🤔
Then I tried another company real time MCU, this time only exploring documentation without buying anything (not available ICs anyway… 😂 ). I was disappointed again. Simpler documentation, but less demo material.
Now, I’m in my third try! I’ve bought some ST MCUs STM32F&G series demo boards and finally I understand how to do things. Things are not perfect but I understand what is what and that’s a big advantage in my mind.
✅ For anyone like me, looking how to sneak into the digital control world, I’ve decided that ST shows you the path of least resistance❗
💥 PSFB transformer 2nd attempt – Core specs 💥
