Tektronix ELR 21000 Targets 800 V Data Center Power Testing

What it means for hiring

Tektronix has launched the EA-ELR 21000, a regenerative electronic load for testing the power shelves going into AI data centres as they move to 800 V DC distribution. It works up to 1,000 V and 5,120 A, scales to 1,920 kW from 30 kW modules in a 42U rack, and reaches a current slew rate of 12 A per microsecond so engineers can reproduce the sudden load steps of accelerators. It returns up to 95 percent of the energy it absorbs to the grid rather than turning it into heat.

Test equipment gets built when there are enough engineers who need it, and this launch says 800 V DC power shelves are moving from concept into validation. The teams designing and testing them look a lot like the teams that built 800 V electric vehicle platforms a few years ago: high-voltage DC safety, fast transient control, megawatt-scale thermal design and the discipline to qualify hardware against a customer's specification. Power supply makers and hyperscalers now need test and validation engineers who can run megawatt DC benches safely, and very few people outside automotive have done that. Electric vehicle power electronics teams in Germany are the obvious place to look, and after a year of slower EV programmes some of those engineers are open to a market that is growing faster than their own.

Read the original at Power Electronics News .