Greetings, Fluxeonians! This is your 2016 Summer Newsletter...just a little bit late, with fall right around the corner. :)
But speaking of late... we have garnered quite a reputation for taking a looooong time to fill orders. Well, those days are now in the past! Current order fulfillment is 3-5 days, but many orders will ship out same-day.
Annie went through another upgrade. We're on rev. 1.9 right now. What's new?
- Annie got SiC. And that cured her!
- Silicon Carbide is the dream material for semiconductors. While much more costly than it's older sibling, silicon, it gives huge payback:
- Reduced waste heat, which translates directly to increased duty-cycle. We're still testing in order to get a firm number, but with certainty we have passed 65% (from 30%).
- Larger SOA (safe operating area). Silicon Carbide can operate a much higher temperatures, up to 175C. This makes the transistors much more resilient.
- The cure is not inexpensive. SiC can be more than 10X the cost of silicon. We are NOT increasing the price of Annie to make up for it!
- Annie now has a beefier transformer and larger fan
- With the increased duty-cycle, we needed to also up-rate the transformer.
- The internal fan we previously used became inadequate. so we switched to a 10,000 rpm, 28mm fan, replacing the 20mm 6000rpm. It makes a little more noise, but we're looking into a fan with a magnetically levitated shaft (MagLev) instead of the normal bearings.
Sincerely,
Garett Churchill, CEO
