Monday, February 12, 2007

Manufacturing Test System





Pyro Test designs turnkey test systems for manufacturing. In this case, our end application called for us to create a manufacturing test system that would produce, upon demand, any current from 200 mA to 350 Amps (and that was the easy part). The hard part was finding a way to switch-on the current, cleanly, with a very fast slew rate (i.e. go from 0 to 350 amps in less than 500 us) while still providing a switch resistance at least 100 times less than the nominal E/I (in our application, we could not afford to drop any significant amount of voltage across the switch). The POWER-GATE was the only switch solution which would work for our application. We contacted the folks at Perfect Switch and worked directly with one of the design engineers in order to verify that the POWER-GATE would indeed work for our intended application.Our final test set solution included several non-inductive load trays switched by the POWER-GATE product (see photo). The completed system has been up and running without a problem since we installed it on the factory floor. The end-client (a very large and well known company) was exceptionally pleased with the test system. I'm happy to report that, because of our outstanding success with this first product, we have been awarded a second purchase order from our client.

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