EEVblog #1293 - New Rohde and Schwarz NGP800 800W PSU

oh yeah look at this bad boys sex on a stick this is the new NGP 800 series just released in late February and thank you very much your own Schwartz for sending this one in it was just unannounced unrequested but they figured that I didn't have enough good power supplies here in the lab you seen the previous ones I clearly don't have enough quality power supplies here so obviously they sent me their brand speaking new one because these were the HMP one given that they've got h in front of them of course they're the older hey Meg design ones and of course the one up the top is the newer that's the ng e but this bad boy down here is the new rodent Schwartz in GP 800 in particular this is the n GP eight one four so this is like the top of the line for channel model you can actually get a two channel a model apparently and it simply just has these unpopulated no you can't put anything else up here because that's actually the events as we'll see to get the air in and look what it must be all touchy-feely because it's you just select the channels here and the back and an output on/off button and that's it whereas the other ones what they actually took some getting used to there but what they're great once you actually get used to sort of like the user interface on the things but yeah this one should be significantly easier in terms of usability I suspect even though I haven't powered it up yet what's a star button turns you into an electronic superstar so you might think oh well why have they done this one instead of what's wrong with this one up here well not only is it an older design but it's a they still sell it all these are still current models and they're still excellent but this bad boy is twice the output voltage that you can get a 64 volt option and twice the current as well it can go up to 20 amps and also twice the power it's got 800 watts total whereas this one up here I only had their previous top of the range around 360 something like this so this is designed for you know serious lab and production test rack integration and things like that this is a really serious bad boy power supply 800 watts all independent channels all remote sensing it's got all the bells and whistles about that remote comms and everything else so let's check it out so basically yep it's touchy-feely user interface twice the voltage twice the current twice the power capability oh let's go this is literally their top shelf unit and as I mentioned we've got the front vents here to suck the air in over the power supply modules as we'll see no vents on the side but over on this side we do have some vents but that's basically for like a transformer ventilation so to speak the actual power supply modules there'll be two of them in here like this I suspect and so it gets the majority of the airflow are coming from the frontier and of course if you've got this thing shoved inside Iraq that's what you want the air coming from look at those badass terminals on the back here all four channels there or like output and remote sense as well for all four channels wow they're absolutely enormous two big fans on the back and what's a Kensington lock there because you know if you've got this in a university lab or something you don't want the students making it I Triple E for double awaits not populated bummer and of course multiple digital triggers and it looks like analog signals as well which you could possibly trigger off or sample or do whatever because one of the key features of this is apparently it has login on like all the channels I don't know the sample rate don't know the bitrate bit depth and all that sort of stuff but anyway we've got USB Z's and land Z's as well I think there might be a wireless option oh you know we say you're on the eevblog don't turn it on take it apart except not with this cuz that's a Philips and it looks like these aren't Philips of course they got thread sealers on it one good thing about power supply is that you can never have too many of them Golden Rule electronics made in Malaysia instead of Germany geez well they're trying to do our compete keysight case i get all their best stuff made in malaysia - whoa it's not void it's expired tada percussive maintenance required oh I can smell the quality from here oh this is fantastic Wow well I don't know where to start in this thing isn't this gorgeous the first thing I noticed when I took it off is that there's an ethernet cable running from the main board at the back here through to the front panel that's interesting so they've got PCB mount ethernet cables on there well notice all the big cables coming across here for cable ties on there to hold those in place all this silicon as well oh wow wow they're beautiful oh they just this is not feel a vision but yep you can just tell and now that PVC rubbish they're fantastic of course that's for the rear panel output connectors and that sense lines as well the small light cables in there are the sense lines obviously and they've got to come from the front might have to actually unque will tie everything to get this board out anyway I was are completely wrong about the layout I just assumed that there would be board here going the whole length like that to be like two channels and another two channels here the mains power supply is up the back here this is interesting in its own right we'll take a look at it and then there's two square boards here that's one well that's two channels so you can see the heat sinks there so these two channels are the like the factory channels and then these two on its own board over here identical board of course is the other two channels and yes all four even though it is a separate board for each two channels all the channels are actually are completely isolated in their own right don't immediately see how the power comes into those it might be our via little standoffs so let's just have a look at the mains input side of things here very nice right there like that's all properly heat shrunk the mains power supply is not a separate module they've integrated it onto this main board here these are the main input fuses look at this they've actually fused the active and the neutral as well absolutely fantastic and then we've got our of course our inputs our filtering we've got a big mob in there we've got our filtering to ground of course so x and y class caps and then we've got common mode choke of course more extra filtering on the other side and and it looks like there's another common mode choke in there really buggering off isn't it it's probable is a power factor corrected power supply I don't know anyway they say this is like a really efficient power supply of tiny little fan controller down there two cables so that actually controls both fins so that'll bugger off over there but you know this is like integrated on to the main board it really is quite remarkable because in most designs you want to separate your mains power supply from the rest of your board you want to either get another external company to design the power supply and manufacture then you just bolted in and that's easier and cheaper and all sorts of stuff but they've integrated absolutely everything onto this board so it's fantastic so you can see that they've got ground earth running around the outside here there's been a huge amount of clearance in there but I guess it's adequate what is that five six millimeters something like that between mains and earth in terms of creepage distance anyway our mains earth looks like it's down there and then put that in a gorgeous big slot with the cable underneath there so that's really remarkable so yeah you can see the earth cable buggering off there under that fan and then it actually goes into there so that that's really built and braces very impressed by that Oh aha that Ethernet cable there literally an Ethernet extension cable so there's the ethernet connected down the bottom there and that just connects it up through to the main board over here and that that's all our process stuff is on the front there on the front panel and curiously we have a whole bunch of power supply stuff integrated down into the main board here look at these big current shunt resistors there wow they're huge like we've got a little controller and there I can't see the part number but obviously and with the choke and the diode and the cap and other caps around there that's obviously you know a switch mode will get a whole bunch of those which is rather interesting and they go up via this blue cable all of that is a regulator for all of the circuitry on the front panel or the processor stuff by the looks of it so why you wouldn't have that over on the actual processor board I don't know did they run out of space it's a it's a really interesting decision maybe these are all your different rails is it you know your three point three your one point eight year one point two or your core voltages for you various whiz-bang processes that you need these days it's just very interesting that you separate those right on the other side of the product I'd say that just probably didn't have room on the front panel and they thought oh you know look we've got our power supply people laying out this anyway they might as well do all this you know the power supply group or something and then that goes over here to this seriously interest in looking custom switch mode obviously the power was coming from over here you can see it jumping through all the vias here it goes all the way up here for always follow the money then it goes through a fuse into there like that so it's a multi-phase fly back is it anyway current shunt resistor over there there's an opto and of course do it just dawned on me these would be the four separate isolated supplies for our four channels as in for the control stuff not the actual power it's just for the control circuitry so I see it now based on the layout these share a common ground here you can see there there there and there so that is one channel two channels a channels and four channels that makes sense because we have a four channel power supplies four channel isolated converter like relatively low power I would presume the control logic on each individual channel well this is interesting you know I'm having a hard time getting this out here but the upper two channels here which is the option of our Channel three and four here is a on its own little PCB so some of those big beefy red and black cables go into there but the other one is actually integrated down on the main PCB down here yes that's integrated down there with the mains a power supply it's all just really fascinating and probably essential system design because they're trying to squeeze like a 4 independent channel 800 watt power supply into a 2 rack unit high thing here and yeah they just have to do a lot of unusual design measures to get all this stuff sort of stuff to fit now I really would like to show you the mains a power supply but unfortunately I can't because it's under here and they've got thermal adhesive between the two heat sinks either side here because this adds really not a huge amount of actual thermal performance but what they're doing there is basically using that as like an air guide to force it under and through the fins just so that there's like you know less airflow over the top I guess or less turbulent flow or whatever that's just one flat part if you wanted to increase the thermal performance you would have added like fins on top of here and you know going in this direction of course so you'd have your various drive transistors on these two heat sinks and and or diodes there's a big-ass choke under there on its own little single sided PCB down in there but that's all I can see really sorry unless I get a better angle later on but here you go here's how they're getting the power to the board's over here did give away two large pins here in this surface mount connector but bottom board entry so they got holes the bottom of the board they just come through up into there so that's how they're getting the input power over to each channel so there's one there and there's another fighting behind the ribbon there and then they've just got some like miscellaneous power as well I'd love to be able to show you the brand of the caps under there unfortunately um nope not getting that out oh hang on I see a budge we got one there it is down there check it out mod why I got down very nice and is that a little ceramic cap under some silicon gunk there looks like it last minute job' and they obviously didn't want to reap in the board maybe in the next production badge and of course if you hate your thinking cap on you would have realized Dave how do we get our isolation on all four channels don't we need an isolated like supply like an isolated transformer tap or however it you have an old-school transformer caps in full wave bridge rectifiers come on anyway don't we need our isolated input like this well of course obviously they haven't done that here right there's no way that they can get four independent isolated channels here so I bet your bottom dollar if we measure the inputs of between two different channels will find that they are shorted and yep it's not isolated on the input it's isolated in the converter itself so yeah that's what these bad boys are doing that's how we get now isolation on the output it's not done at the input side of thing so all of your stuff down on that logic level connected down in there that it all be are common as well I'd guess and yes the output ground also with a large high voltage a ceramic job' going down to mains earth as well once again that's for suppression so I undid all those cable ties there and I was able to slide out that plate luckily I didn't I could slide it out and don't have to undo these because I'd have to unbolt every single connection if I want to get those out anyway good news is all four channels absolutely identical so we only need to look at one all right let's have a squiz at this bad boy this is one individual channel as I said they'd all be identical and yes they are all isolated as I said so you can stack the channels in series or parallel to your heart's content anyway as I said we've got the input coming oh I almost certainly this is the input here so underneath the that's actually not a resistor that's actually a heat shrink PCB a fuse there without soldered end caps so all individually fused of course we've got ourselves a large ceramic cap going down to our mains earth here so that's for suppression of course and then you've got our miscellaneous control and voltage stuff coming in here ah now this this is interesting let me see if we can get a close-up on that what we're actually looking at here is a current transformer check this out we've got all these are fine windings of course going around the ferrite but then through it we have this winding here which goes through that so it's a basically a current transformer a current clamp transform us now in this particular case because of its physical location here it seems to be measuring the input current to the actual converter itself so probably for like overload protection or you know there's monitoring something like that perhaps because it's obviously not measuring the output current because you can't do that in this physical location on the circuit so yeah that's neat but curiously if you go to the other side of these chokes here by the looks of it we've got another couple up there as well so once again this is not doesn't seem to be measuring the actual output current so I don't know why they need to do that twice more pure and that chokes an absolute beast look at that ah well what does that to Mill solid copper oh it's about 1.7 millicent including this here which is actually going to be a thermic they're all just stuck down on this screw rubbish this stuck down we say thermal adhesive tape they're on both on all the heat sinks on each module there's three heat sinks total Oh we might be able to get a part number down there there's all the rest of the parts going on there is that a pic or all the pic fanboys going to go wild without being able to see those numbers I'd be guessing we probably have like a duck we're gonna have an ADC in there I'm gonna sell us a real fair dinkum relay as well got some miscellaneous regulators and those four babies down in there had a good look and there are stt h2o2 s ultra fast deities and check out this bad boy on the heatsink here oh isn't that a Bobby Dazzler yes that is a 5 milli ohm current sense resistor it's a 4 terminal job of course - for cents and - for the actual resistor itself and yes it is a thermally mounted onto the heatsink there I don't know what the part next to it is though but anyway that is obviously aware they are measuring the output current from and that would be worth a pretty penny that thing down on their own heat sink down there there are 460 are 360s they'd be MOSFETs now this is actually starting to look an awful lot like a resonant mode controller it just makes sense walk it's a basic generic resonant mode topology but I think we're gonna see that line up here we've got ourselves our 4 diodes down here we've got ourselves four MOSFETs under here so I think that's what we're gonna see so that's probably just part of an output filter I'd say but yeah I'd say yeah it's coming in here this is our full wave bridge these are our caps let's stick with me and that way we've got an inductor we've got a then our isolation transformer we've got our four output rectifier diodes down here and then there's as I said there's another MOSFET under here so I'm not quite sure what they're doing there and then we've just got some output filtering so yeah I think that's how it works sure the power supply aficionados will all be coming in down below about what's going on here but anyway it looks to be some variation of a resonant mode controller exactly how they're doing it I don't know we'd have to reverse engineer it and that we're to cry ripping the whole guts out so rather curiously all of the wires here are actually soldered down to the PCB down here there are like crimped into little you know proper little crimping lugs and there there are soldered down to the boards so all that wire in there yeah you can see the see the ground wire down in there there you go focus your bastard there you go right down there you can see that they've got those crimp leads on there which go into the board so nice attention to detail there but yeah that's surprising that they didn't use an off board connector so check out these output boards down in here who are the huge big crimp terminals here absolutely massive and shape proof washers the whole shebang so that is very nice all your terminals at once again I think they got a little maybe a little bit of output capacitance there not much of course in a good lab power supply you do not want too much output capacitance because then when you transition from constant voltage to constant current mode you've got all that energy in those output caps and you don't want that to dump into your poor little load that you're trying to instantly protect so ya can't just whack you know ten thousand Mike on the output of your power supply to make it super stable and then ya not think you're going to come a gutter when you power your circuit yeah eagle-eyed viewers will have no doubt spotted the ceramic on the output there I think that could be once again some suppression to ground I think and I think that's directly across the output now because I've done a video on where our ceramic caps like that can explode and if they get cracked micro crack they can short out and the magic smokers can be released and you've got a real interesting video on that actually a couple of videos and how you can solve that by using either put two in series or you can solve that by using special specially constructed ceramics that fail open or are simply more resistant to cracking due to various construction techniques anyway there is our ego it looks like it has integrated factory integrated wife I don't know if that is like a software option or not who knows anyway sorry it's hard to really get down into this board so please excuse the crude D of the video didn't have time to build it to scale out of paint it looks like a freezer Freescale job' down there there you go so that's the applications processors driving all the touchscreen whoo-whoo and yeah you got all the requisite memory flash and DRAM as well nice headers down there there's two headers are they JTAG headers that'd be really nice I spy a reset button or it could be like a serial interface you art as well so yeah it'd be interesting to probe those I won't do that in this video though but anyway that's just your requisite control board nothing special really but anyway as output connectors Bobby Dazzler so as you can see the construction in this thing absolutely gorgeous first-class design and build quality worth every cent and you're paying for it I mean this is the top shelf rohde & schwarz power supply just released so yeah hats off to the design team a very very nice indeed just working this back together and noted the little RF fingers they're nice alright let's power this bad boy on unfortunately our soft power button on the front does have a real clunk and power switch on the back though so hopefully I reconnected everything let's go in gp8 one 4pl supply beauty because there is no model number on here it's just ng p800 so they don't actually bother to tell you that rohde schwarz booting booting oh what what was that okay that was just like soft booting is this hello oh there we go okay yep now we're doing the real booting are we I suspect so it was just booting up to standby mode effectively I suspect that's what was happening there so yet not exactly the world's quickest booting power supplies every day you sir but this is not for every day yes bench power supply so it sit back to do your thumbs oh boy yeah oh there we go we're in like Flynn look at that four separate indicators for the four channels absolutely fantastic I love that they can hang on that's yellow but that's orange okay okay I've got my color balanced studio lights on here and well yeah yellow and that's supposed to be orange wah wah wah wah yeah I can kind of see it but it's just not the same they really should have picked another car I don't know about like the whole colorblind thing and things like that so I'm sure our colorblind Oh viewers will tell us all about that whether or not they're suitable but yeah no I think that's poor choice but anyway it doesn't really matter cuz it's obvious that's channel 1 and this channel 1 they're physically the same so yeah no workers suppressor output button on that's it we're just going to start measuring or one milliamp there so obviously without reading the manual there you go channel one so we got ok so there you go output one off and on so these are your enable buttons for your channels and this is your complete on-off output so that absolutely makes sense by default it's comes as one volt that's about three milli volts and of it yeah nothing doing there can't use our knobby knob for anything really that's just a selection thing oh by the way yeah for those complaining at home there we go spill that bad boy off there we go let's press the home button I guess the home button this is we are in the home menu I mean we can call up yeah this all our menus we'll check that out later this way pa review sorry it was more of a like unboxing teardown thing but presumably can we just touch that ah yep I hope the knob works oh yeah the knob sort of didn't wear yet goes up in increments so obviously our curses in that position but the problem is like you can't just like move your cursor over and like select let there's no arrow keys on here to move your cursor over to set the jumping increments it's one volt so that's the very first thing I noticed about that anyway I do like the display it's really good and I'm sure it will change color like to read or something of go into constant current mode from green to red but anyway we've got our set voltage and our Reebok voltage our set current and our read back current for each channel so it's nice it's got our output power as well brilliant so yeah I like the interface it's nice except yeah how do we like yeah I can hit that okay and then I can like oh okay there we go so then I can use that to sort of let's go 10 milli volt increments shall we and then weird yeah okay it's there but anyway it's and it's going live - that's the other thing it's outputting lies so it doesn't wait until you like push the button oh no there we go there we go I figured it out law that's pretty nice okay yep that's really good okay now I take back what I said about that that's really good I can then go to there just move the cursor by pressing that very nice yep yep thumbs up and sure enough yep if you work a load on it go into constant current mode there it is there I'm at one point it's dropped from six volts to one point one and of course the reason it doesn't dump much is one point one out here and it's 1 volt reading on here is because of out the drop in our leads and our connections because we're not remote sensing anything I really like that even though it's displaying only one milliamp there you can actually set down here in increments of 0.5 milliamps so you get a little bit extra for your dollars there now of course this is an 800 watt hour power supply so that means it's not limited to 200 watts per channel so there'll be an average current envelope there so you can't just go to the maximum 0 to 32 volts are 0 to 20 years can't just go oh I'll take our 30 volts at 20 amps please because you're going to blow you 200 watt budget here so if we go to channel 1 for example when we set it to 30 volts we can't just go into here and set 10 amps here up 10 amps on our current they're not sorry we can only go to six point six six six and there's nothing unusual about that at all any well Spector lab power supply will have a power envelope like that it's called and you'll actually find that in the manual and now I can't get it to what hiccup or do anything like that with our BK precision power supply killer here in that constant resistance mode it's just handling that just fine no workers anyway 20 amps output to our capability that is a very nice that you know not many too many lab power suppliers will go up to what 20 amps so that's absolutely brewing and as for the noise in this thing I can barely hear it the fans are actually going but there are obviously temperature high temperature control because it's it's pretty silent and if I switch the load off can still hear him going but geez yeah it's it's quite a low-level background I'm gonna whisper quiet lab at the moment and yeah you can hear it but certainly not annoying alright let's go and explore some of our options shall we let's go into the channel look at this output that's going that delay we can set a delay on our channel I assume we set that up somewhere else remote sense of course Auto that's very nice so we can set it to external sense here if you got it hooked up but yeah Otto's nice if you plug it in it's going to detect that I don't think the others had that poor I don't think so please correct me if I'm wrong and yep hi at the screen is a bit reflective little bit annoying but no you know it's par for the course these days anyway I'm over current protection I assume that's just software over current protection and over-voltage protection of course absolutely essential if you're pairing like I've powered up boards worth you know like 50 grand that's like them up it's like the first prototype or it could be worth you know a million bucks because if you blow up that one prototype board and you lose your schedule for your project and a million dollar or ten million dollar projects hanging by the thread of literally black thread of these wires hanging out pairing up the prototype yeah you want it you don't want to blow the ice out of it and release the magic smoke so that's what you do over voltage protection to make sure if it's a 5 volt board for example you'd set your over voltage protection to like five point two five or five point five as so just to be sure that you don't go over that limit and over current protection as well that is different to your output voltage and current settings it just means that some idiot manager can't come along or marketing person can't come along and start twiddling the knobs and and playing with the panel and actually blow up your million-dollar prototype and it's got ramps as well enabled you can enable our ramp our ramp time either that's just nice to certain like I could put it on the scope but I guarantee you it's going to work it's just going to ramp up over the one second nice linear ramp absolutely fantastic because some supplies special aren't real complex semiconductors these days you've got to bring them up in the right sequence and in the right amount of time so you know they're really handy and then you've got arbitrary stuff and I'm sure you could do PC software I can literally spend a week and a several hour video actually fully reviewing everything on this power supply so obviously that's not possible are over power protection as well very nice and log input so we can tie our analog input to once again I haven't read the manual for this so and local voltage or current set so what do we do I guess we set that somewhere else so analog enabled so it won't so we can switch on or off based on analog input perhaps adjustment use a restore factory adjustment user adjustment if you want to self calibrate I guess and safety limits what are safety limits there you go once again what what's the difference between safety limits and over voltage over current protection but geez well they're taking this seriously aren't they this is absolutely incredible and you've got all this for each individual channel so let's go into device so in our arbitrary waveform editor can we actually draw because we do have a touchscreen can we like the drawer in like a dick and balls or something and then have it generate that that'd be cool but anyway I'm sure you can tie that into our other rohde & schwarz gear like scope so you can capture a waveform then maybe replay it on your power supply something like that tracking of course if you want to track up multiple channels if you want to adjust once and then have any or all track can you set individual yep look at that you can set I want channel three to check track channel one thank you very much fantastic digital i/o trigger so there you go so yep you can set that to trigger I'm not sure if you're gonna sign those two individual channels that would be kind of cool and then we've got all their interface stuff I've got our networking of course we've got our Ethernet and our wife eyes and our USB classes and all that sort of goodness out user-defined oh that's a user-defined button we figured out what the star does here you go use a button action was it do a screen shot oh that's fantastic or you can turn on login absolutely brilliant so let's just a reset statistics I touch lock if you want to bugger off the touchscreen if you don't as I said you know if marketing or management's coming around to like have a look at your later start prototype you want to like turn off the touchscreen so the decades can't screw it up on you absolute that's great I like that but I'm gonna select login thank you very much so if we actually go out of here and we switch our outputs actually on and if we can we just hit login oh there we go it's a little tiny log icon up there so it's looking that log in all four channels presumably and we can I presume we can export that to what CSV to our hearts content so absolutely terrific I like the menu interface it's very simple you've got like like the entire device one like this or individual channels update device licenses and stuff like that CSV settings there it is yep so that's for your login stuff you can change what format you want geez there really went to town on this that's absolutely terrific I'm yeah I'm impressed this is good and we can go fullscreen oh look at this well you this wow there's all of stats as well so that's where we could assign that button there reset our statistics ah absolutely terrific so if we turn on channel 1 here there we go we're actually logging and we've got stats and we can reset those tells us how many they presume that's well yet there we go we can just reset that there Oh energy as well it does energy calculation look what hours there it is in this case milli watt hours ah great for battery testing and stuff like that this user interface is fantastic I'm really liking this this is going to be my main bench supply this one's a Bobby Dazzler so there you have it I might leave it at that because as I said a full-on review could take forever but if you do want to see something are specific you can't actually leave it in the comments I might be able to shoot like a quick video and whack it on the second channel that's my second channels for really is just whacking like I seen you know really quick take quick and dirty single take quick and dirty videos over there and stuff like that no spit and polish no nothing but anyway this is absolutely fantastic new in GP 800 I don't know the price if you have to ask the price you maybe you can't afford it a bit in this an absolute Bobby Dazzler thank you very much rohde & schwarz wow this is top-shelf stuff I'm impressed a user interface is they've really thought about that and works well as like other rohde & schwarz I gear works like the the run Schwarz scope that works absolutely fantastically from it like a user interface up interview very lots of spit-and-polish has gone into the design and functionality of this thing and yeah they just released it I'll try and maybe working some prices or something like that I don't know what the equivalent competitors are from other manufacturers but yeah this has got winner written all over it absolutely fantastic but it's not for you low-cost lab like none of this sort of rohde schwarz gear is really it's it's not built down to a price it's built for performance and functionality and you know you certainly pay a bit of a premium for that but Wow it's worth every cent fantastic love it anyway if you like that video please give it a big thumbs up as always you can discuss down below and over on the Eevee blog forum and yep you guessed it my library channel whoo arts getting up there I'm number five in the world I'm hoping to pass veritasium that's my next target I think yep so I think Derek from veritasium is going to come a gut sassoon in the eevblog audience it's going to surpass him so check that out linked in down below as always catch you next time [Music]

Channel: EEVblog

Views: 93,967

Rating: 4.9042425 out of 5

Keywords: eevblog, video, rohde and swartz, ngp800, power supply, review, teardown, resonant mode converter, llc converter

Id: Q-gi_jfXhg0

Length: 39min 52sec (2392 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 20 2020