What Is a Power Supply Board?
Power circuits are essential in all electrical and electronic equipment. The power supply board is the form in which this power circuit is realized.
Instead of optimally designing this power supply board for each individual device, power supply modules in which power supply circuits made for general-purpose applications are implemented are often used, and since this is currently a very effective means, we will replace the power supply board with a power supply module.
A power supply circuit is designed to take 100 VAC commercial power as input and output the DC voltage required by the internal circuits. The DC voltage required by the internal circuits can be aggregated to 3.3V to 48V, depending on the equipment. Furthermore, the required current values can also be consolidated.
Therefore, if a power supply circuit that can supply more voltage and current than can be designed in-house exists as a complete module-type component, it will be of great value to utilize it.
The power supply module was born for this purpose. By narrowing down the specifications to a few types of power supply modules and producing them in large quantities, costs can be reduced, and high-performance modules can be designed because they are designed by engineers specializing in power supply circuit design.
Uses of Power Supply Boards
Power supply modules are used in a wide variety of equipment, including industrial equipment, information processing equipment such as computers and servers, home appliances such as TVs and refrigerators, and AV equipment such as recorders and audio components.
As various devices become more sophisticated and high-performance, and as devices become smaller, the installation space allowed for power supply circuits is becoming more and more limited, resulting in the need for smaller size, higher performance, and higher efficiency.
The need for dedicated power supply modules is increasing for these reasons, besides the potential cost savings compared to in-house design.
Principle of Power Supply Boards
There are two types of power supply modules: AC/DC power supply modules, which convert the aforementioned AC voltage to DC voltage, and DC/DC power supply modules, which boost or buck DC voltage.
AC/DC power supply modules take 100 VAC commercial power as the input and output, the specific DC voltage required by the internal circuitry of the equipment.
A DC/DC power module outputs a specified voltage by boosting or stepping down the voltage required by the internal circuitry after it has been converted to a DC voltage in the equipment.
In addition to simply converting AC to DC or DC voltage, many power supply modules have various built-in protection functions, such as overcurrent protection circuits and overvoltage protection circuits to prevent excessive current from flowing into internal circuits, and overcurrent protection circuits to prevent heating due to the amount of current flowing into the circuit. There are many power supply modules.
In addition, power supply circuits are strictly standardized according to various safety standards because incorrect use of the equipment can sometimes result in heat generation and ignition. Power supply modules generally comply with these various safety standards.