Archive for May, 2010

Product Certification

This article explains the saga of having electronic products certified for sale.   In order to be able to sell a piece of electronic equipment or device in a country, various certifications may be required to be acquired as per the appropriate governing regulations set by that country. Each country may mandate compliance with its own set of standards which would form a large stockpile of documents. However in most cases, such standards are derived from or are variations of a more internationally recognized standard such as the one laid out by the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission). An example is the BS EN 55024, a British Standard that lays down the limits ...

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Golden Rules for Electronic Circuit Design

This short article presents a concise checklist of rules that must be followed for an electronic design to be successful. Ascenten ensures that all of its designs conform to the following guidelines:

  • All components must conform to the specified temperature range. For resistors, de-rating of power rating at peak temperature must be considered. For capacitors de-rating of capacitance, leakage and increase in ESR at peak temperature may be important. For other components such as diodes and transistors, parameters such as recovery times and current gain vary with temperature and must be considered at extreme temperatures. In summary, no design calculation must be left to chance (as is often the
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A Simple Method of Doing Electronic Circuit Design Calculations

Electronic circuit design, especially power design is an iterative calculative process that needs several assumptions to be made at the time of calculations and may need iterative adjustments of such assumptions depending on acceptability of the result. A computer worksheet becomes an indispensable tool for such calculations, wherein it allows designer to change assumed values giving results instantly. A very simple and effective scheme of doing such calculations has evolved at Ascenten and is demonstrated by this example: Click Here   The calculations are those of a Boost DC-DC converter converting an input voltage range of 7V to 17V into an output at 18V. The worksheet has been divided into ...

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