RE: What does an applications engineer do?

John Davies — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 12:09:31 GMT

Illuminating! I'll put a link on a page for my students. It's always helpful to show what a specific job such as applications engineering entails. The leakage of the electrolytic capacitor is a good example too.

RE: What does an applications engineer do?

John Haddy — Mon, 02 Dec 2013 01:05:58 GMT

Hi John,

I followed your link to TIPD108 and noticed that in section 3.1 of SLAU508 (the TIPD108 reference design guide) you write: "This is because the 10th harmonic of a triangle wave has a frequency 19 times the fundamental."

You lost me on this one - both Wikipedia and I believe that the 10th harmonic = 10 * fundamental. I'm guessing that you were working from the fact that a triangle wave contains only odd harmonics and that you were counting up these?

For your design, shouldn't you rather define the acceptable error in the triangle wave's accuracy and derive the bandwidth from this? Knowing that a triangle wave has higher order harmonics rolling off proportional to the inverse square of the harmonic number, the required accuracy is readily translated: e.g. your 19*f (i.e. the 19th harmonic) contributes 1/19^2 = 1/361 to the amplitude i.e. 0.28%

Have I missed the point somehow?

RE: What does an applications engineer do?

Laszlo Fabian — Sun, 01 Dec 2013 15:50:33 GMT

Hi John,

Nice video, congrats, and I have a similar big blue capacitor on my desk too :))