Power Electronics Test Solutions

Power delivery and management is foundational to every electronic system. From USB Power Delivery negotiation in consumer devices to PMBus-controlled server voltage regulators and SVID interfaces between CPUs and their power stages, the protocols that manage power are critical to system stability, efficiency, and safety. Power engineers face challenges that span both analog and digital domains. USB PD negotiation involves complex state machines and message exchanges that must complete within strict timing windows. PMBus communication with voltage regulators can fail silently, leaving rails at incorrect voltages. SVID interface issues between a processor and its voltage regulator can cause VR faults or performance throttling. Power sequencing, where multiple rails must ramp up and down in a specific order with defined timing, is a common source of design bugs that only manifest under certain load or temperature conditions. Acute instruments are particularly strong for power system debug because they bridge the analog-digital divide. The MSO2000 and MSO3000 mixed-signal oscilloscopes capture analog power rail waveforms alongside decoded digital bus traffic, letting you see exactly how a PMBus write command affects the actual output voltage. The TravelLogic and LA4000 logic analyzers decode USB PD, PMBus, SVID, and MIPI SPMI protocols, showing negotiation sequences, register accesses, and command/response pairs in human-readable form. Acute's power sequence validation feature monitors 16 to 128 channels of power rail timing simultaneously, verifying that your sequencing meets design specifications across all operating conditions.