MISC-TN-027 — Qualifying a product for industrial, harsh environments: resilience against power supply anomalies
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Contents
History[edit | edit source]
| Version | Date | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| 1.0.0 | July 2023 | First public release |
Introduction[edit | edit source]
Over the decades, DAVE Embedded Systems has been sharpening a tight qualification process for the products the company has been commissioned to design and manufacture. On one hand, this process is engineered to cope with the challenging requirements of industrial applications operating in harsh environments. On the other hand, it tackles the ever-increasing complexity of system-on-chips powering these products themselves.
The qualification process comprises several tests with different characteristics and goals. One of these tests is specifically designed for verifying the resilience of DUT's power supply unit (PSU) to supply voltage anomalies, which are pretty common in industrial environments. This Technical Note (TN for short) describes how we run this test.
Test description[edit | edit source]
To make this test possible, DAVE Embedded Systems designed an ad hoc smart bench power supply denoted as PPSU. PPSU is used to power the DUT, which is the electronic device undert test. You can think PPSU as a programmable power waveform generator that is also able to verify the health status of the DUT. PPSU can generate an arbitrary supply voltage that exhibits purposely anomalies such as glitches of different duration and non-monotonic ramps. A robust product is expected to be resilient against these stressing conditions. This means that it is supposed not to be affected at all or to perform a warm reboot cycle properly when it is inevitable a hardware reset is triggered. Of course, the expected behaviour strongly depends on the nature and severity of the injected anomaly. After the anomaly is injected, PPSU verifies whether the DUT is perating properly or not and logs the test result. PPSU can also be programmed to run the test cycle repeatedly for the desired number of iterations. As it operates in the industrial temperature range, it can be
Combining several test waveforms of different types (1) and running these test over the entire DUT's operating temperature range allow to achieve good confidence that the product's PSU will not fail in the field because of "misbehaving" power supplies.
