Inductors for the Uninitiated

Focus:

For the non-power specialist designing point-of-load converters of 100 W or less, there are many reference materials to guide you through ferrite inductor design and selection. At higher power levels, the inductor options multiply and the design and selection tasks becomes more difficult. This blog entry offers a brief, but practical introduction to a few different inductor types—a small 47-uH ferrite, a large 22-uH ferrite and a medium-size 64-uH powder core toroid. The author describes and compares each of these inductors, using measurements of their impedance, phase, and Q taken with a Bode 100 vector network analyzer. Analyzing the data, he offers some guidance on how to use these components, while illustrating the need for designers to make their own inductor measurements to make up for the lack of vendor-supplied data.

What you’ll learn:

• How to understand the value of measuring inductor performance when designing power inductors, particularly for higher-power (>100 W) applications
• How to compare inductor performance using a vector network analyzer

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Author & Publication:

Michael Jones, Linear Technology, Vendor website, Aug 21 2013

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