I’ve seen a lot about “coil whine” over the years, referring to laptops mostly, and a lot more complaints more recently.
Is this bad manufacturing and design?
How can it be alleviated?
In: 1
The company I worked for had designed all of our PCBs, (printed circuit boards) using switch mode power supplies without integrated components. Essentially, we had to add the coil, capacitors, resistors, etc… to define the characteristics of the supply. It just so happened the parts we selected caused the frequency the system operated at to be in the audible range. It caused an audible hum or whine, when operating.
To alleviate our issues, we selected different values of components that in the end achieved the same output characteristics, but at a higher operating frequency to prevent the hum. Pretty minor fix and everything else was the same except for the operating frequency so the hum was gone.
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