Power choices abound for high-rel system designers; architectures prove as critical as product selection. (high-reliability)

EDN, December, 1992 by Shepard, Jeffrey D.

There's more to designing a high-reliability power system than simply specifying a power supply with 1-million-hour mean time between failures (MTBF). The architecture of the power system you design can be more important than the MTBF of any individual supply. The first decision a designer faces is selecting a centralized or a distributed architecture.

But even that decision is not as simple as it once was. In the past, designers generally used distributed architectures in large systems such as central-office switches or mainframes and centralized architectures in smaller systems such as PCs or minicomputers. Today designers face a continuum of possible system architectures; often it's not clear where the boundary between centralized and distributed...

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