Greetings, Fluxeonians!

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.