Greetings all... I am now in my mid forties and a few years ago I decided to start up my childhood hobby of electronics again. This was mostly spurred on by digital electronics, something that I have always focused on, and by the rise of all these easy to use micros. Micro's are very close to devices like my early "PCs" of back in the day (Apple ][, ZX-Spectrum, BBC, etc), only much smaller, and more affordable, and not to mention faster. I always enjoyed working on digital electronics and have built and repaired a fair amount of digital stuff to date. I have however never been much good at the analog side of things and have pretty much used boiler plate designs where I needed to in the past. Which brings me to today...
I have decided to try my hand at repairing a PSU from an old Cisco catalyst switch that I had lying around. Traditionally, in this situation, I would check the fuses, diode bridges, MOV's, capacitors and any obvious component that has exploded, failing this I would usually just give up. So at this point, usually, If I really needed to repair it, I would buy an off the shelf PSU unit and butcher it into the chassis. However the switch is way too old and I don't actually have any use for it, but it does present me with an opportunity to fiddle. I have gotten part way into diagnosing it but have come stuck and am hoping some kind soul can point me in the right direction, and hopefully I will learn some things on that journey.
The meat of it...The power supply ouputs 12V and is rated at 8.5A. The output connector leads mostly to the 12V and GND rail of the switch PCB(3 black wires and 3 white wires). There a 2 additional wires of interest that are orange and purple which are used for "PG" and "RPS-pres". This seems to be a "Power Good" signal to the switch, and the "RPS-pres" seems to be some kind of presence detection for the switch, it is just a 3.3K resistor to ground. This is probably to facilitate detection of a backup DC power unit that can also be plugged in.
The circuit seems to have 4 stages that I can identify.
- AC-DC rectification and smoothing
- Power factor correction
- Switch mode DC-DC regulation
- AC-DC rectification smoothing and feedback to 3
The story so far...There does not seem to be any physical damage to the PSU (all the smoke is still inside). I have removed and tested the mosfets that I could find, and they seem to be OK. I am not sure how good my tests are, but mosfets tend to fail catastrophically when they go faulty in any case. The DC conversion portion of the PSU seems to be fine in so much that the rectifier bridge checks out, and I get about a 300VDC reading on my multimeter on V+.
I checked and the PFC IC in the first stage seems to be getting 10V on its VCC pin and I also read about 300V after the second stage choke/inductor/transformer(L010) , so I am assuming that everything in the second sage is OK too (assumptions assumptions). In the 3rd section I am only reading 1.2V on the DC-DC converter IC's VCC pin 7(IC300) and my thinking is that this is a problem.
The 1.2V seems to come as from the 300V rail through a 100K 2W resistor(R335), through a mosfet(Q121) and then a silicon diode(D121). Its actually 1.4V after the mosfet but the diode forward voltage drop seems to be about 0.2V.
I have tried to replace the above mentioned mosfet(Q121) to no avail, and I did not have much hope to begin with as the drain voltage was only 1.5V in any case. At this stage I do not think that the VCC for the DC-DC IC(IC300) is actually being generated by this section, but possibly from the winding pin 5 of the transformer(T120). This however does not sit well with me as I thought that the DC-DC chip would generate the switching frequency to run the transformer so how can its supply come from the transformer? I must be missing something.
I am not even sure where the 10V feeding the VCC of IC001 in the second stage is coming from either. It looks to be from the 300V DC rail through a 220K 1W resistor(R004) but I would expect a second resistor to ground to form a voltage divider circuit, and the second trace that could possibly form this part is diagrammed in the third stage through a 68K resistor and to the gate of the mosfet(Q121) that I was suspicious of. it also branches from there to a transistor(Q122) that goes to ground through a 7.5K resistor(R133) but I am not sure how this section works at all.
Luckily I was able to find a schematic for the unit online. I feel that it's not very well laid out but its a godsend regardless. I have attached it with some of my annotations scrawled on it. After a lifetime of staying away from this stuff I would really like a win, so if anyone can help me on this matter it would be much appreciated.
(excuse the GIF format but it compresses 3 bit indexed gray images better than PNG)