What do you think the biggest issue is when diving into digital control?

What do you think the biggest issue is when diving into digital control

This from D.P. -Lately to me it seems the biggest issue is maintaining a sustaining capability to the company where it is introduced. It requires at least one person that is decent at digital control design and then a team people that can implement. One person that can translate simulation to code, one person that can do state machines, one person that can do communications, etc. Lay on top of that maintenance and so on, it becomes a decent chunk of work.

Also digital technology changes so fast these days it can sometimes be difficult to keep up so you can take advantage of the advancements in processing capability and test capability. Many companies seem to fall behind because they don’t want to abandon their code base.

And this from J.F. – My take on this, as a former digital design engineer that now manages a power design group, is that it takes a very different mind-set to switch from analog power design to the SW/FW coding effort that it takes to implement the digital control algorithm. Since this discipline and way of thinking is foreign, it can be a major hurdle depending on the length of time the individual has been performing power design. Some of my folks are having an easier time to make this transition than others, but all are struggling to come up the learning curve.

These answers and more in the Linkedin discussion group.