Results of a power supply failure survey

by Dr. Ray Ridley, President, Ridley Engineering , Power Systems Design Europe, Feb 15 2014

Focus:
A survey conducted within Ray Ridley’s LinkedIn group, “Power Supply Design Center” asked designers why power supplies fail. This short article presents some of the survey results. First, there is a bar chart breakdown of the survey responses attributing failures to power semiconductors, capacitors, magnetics, PCB or mechanical, and control circuit. The breakdown is by percentage of responses—it’s not clear how many overall responses there were—with failures listed in order of dominance. At the top of this list are power semiconductor failures, and the article goes on to discuss their likely causes with some comments on the magnetics and capacitor failures. Finally, results of a follow-on survey about the causes of power semiconductor failures are discussed.

What you’ll learn:

• How to understand the common causes of power supply failures

Notes:
At the time this article was posted, it contained the wrong images for figures 2 and 3 which relate to the discussion on power semiconductor failures. However, the text is easy enough to follow without these figures.

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