The Vishay microBUCK eval kit, which was a price I won during the 5 Things to Know About Buck Regulators (Winners Announced: Win a Buck Regulator EV Board for Asking Questions!) webinar, arrived today.
YAY. I had to pay import duty, as the board came from the UK and the paperwork was labeled as a regular invoice. UPS processing fee was higher than the duty itself, but it is OK, the board is definitely worth it.
It is a nifty little board featuring the SIC461 wide input voltage, high efficiency synchronous buck regulator with a huge inductor and I am sure it will make its way into one of my future tbd projects.
This is how the board looks like:
My first observation were the jumpers on the board. In the image above, they look un-suspicious, but only because there is no real reference like a banana for scale.
Here is a detail shot with a regular 0.1" jumper next to them.
The jumpers on the board are 0.05" (1.27mm) pitch and they are as tiny as they look in the image. Just pulling or inserting them is a challenge without magnification and tweezers.
As this is a REV A board, my only hope is, that this was an honest footprint mistake, which was missed during layout review because of the lack of scale on the screen. Especially, as there is plenty of real estate on the board for regular sized jumpers. I have to admit, I was not even aware that Hobbit size jumpers exist and I might even use them when I have to do a miniature size layout. But on this board regular jumpers would have been the right choice.
I will report about the functionality and performance of the board when I had a chance to test it. until then....
PS: Those are the first images I have taken with my new light-box. i am going to describe it in a separate post.
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