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Advanced Digital Control Seminar

July 14, 2016 by Jeff Shepard

Recently at APEC 2016, Dr. Hamish Laird presented High Performance Digital Control for Power Electronics. Over 400 engineers learned from an expert in high power applications some of the hidden secrets to getting digital to work properly. This is not material that you can find in the datasheets or application notes, but it is essential for all digital designers to know.

The full three-day course on this topic will be presented August 22-24 at the Ridley Engineering Design Center in Camarillo, California by Dr. Laird. If you are new to digital, have already begun your first design, or if you are experienced, there is essential information in this seminar for production-level power system design and coding.

Dr. Laird has worked for many years in advanced high- and low-power applications for digital design. Essential issues for achieving high performance from digital power electronics will be presented, including: The details of both digital control and power electronics and how they work together; The ability to close a digital power converter feedback loop in a stable fashion by following repeatable and easily-understood steps; Why you should design loops directly in the digital domain, not translate from an analog design; Why you should never tweak the digital coefficients of a loop design;

Techniques to understand the effect of digital control’s limited bandwidth, processing power, number of bits, dynamic range; Knowledge of the interaction of power electronics and digital control, including sampling and aliasing for fixed and variable frequency switching power converters. Knowledge of the interaction of power electronics and digital control, including sampling and aliasing for fixed and variable-frequency switching power converters.

Understanding of the issues that can go wrong when interfacing digital to your power system: How to choose controllers so you won't run out of processing power halfway through your project. Take away methods and steps to solve design issues such as one-sample noise, precision limits in filters and controllers, non-linearity, quantization and other digital effects.

This course is intended for the following skill levels: Experienced analog engineers moving into digital control; Recent graduates; Software engineers; Firmware engineers; and Mid-career engineers. Spaces are limited.