New kit provides engineers with easy entry into digital power control

RS Components has announced worldwide availability of the new XMC Digital Power Explorer Kit from Infineon. The kit was created for analogue power supply designers and embedded software programmers to help accelerate their learning in the capabilities of digital power control. It is also useful for digital engineers to gather a better understanding of PMBusTM technologies for the digital control of power supplies. The kit was developed in collaboration with Biricha Digital and Würth Elektronik. It also features two Infineon ARM Cortex-M based XMC-microcontroller control cards, as well as Infineon’s DAVE v4 IDE software development platform for XMC microcontrollers, which is a free-of-charge code-generation system. The kit is ideal for applications such as industrial, telecom and server power conversion, with the primary purpose to help digital and power engineers bridge the technology gap to create digital power control solutions. The main board includes a synchronous buck DC-DC converter with on-board resistive load banks, which can be switched between 10%, 55% and 100% of the maximum load to enable the testing of the transient response and the quality of the control loop under different load conditions, such as continuous-conduction versus discontinuous-conduction mode. Voltage-mode and peak-current-mode control with slope compensation are also available for the user to experiment. Multiple test points are provided on the power board to check the quality of all relevant signals, and a communication option via PMBusTM is provided for easy integration into more complex power management systems.