About Featured Expert: Bourns

Bourns are longtime global industry experts in circuit protection, resistive components, magnetic products, sensing and electronic controls. The company designs and manufactures components used to control, measure and protect electrical behavior across electronic systems. Its technologies are applied where current, voltage, position, speed, power conversion and transient conditions must be managed within the electrical, mechanical and environmental limits of finished equipment.

Bourns’ earliest work focused on precision position sensing and adjustment technologies. That foundation is still evident across its current portfolio. The company’s potentiometers, encoders, position sensors and related control products support applications where mechanical movement must be translated into a stable electrical signal or setting. These capabilities extend from panel controls and test equipment into transportation, industrial automation and other systems where repeatable position or motion feedback is required. The company’s resistive technologies address another part of that same measurement and control chain. Current-sense resistors, shunts, precision resistors and resistor networks allow designers to monitor current flow, establish circuit values and support feedback or protection functions across power supplies, battery systems, motor controls and industrial electronics.

Bourns-Logo-Featured-Expert-Electronics-Industry-Monthly.png Power conversion introduces additional magnetic and thermal considerations. Bourns offers inductors, transformers and chokes used for energy storage, isolation, filtering and current sensing. Different core materials, current ratings, switching frequencies and package formats allow the magnetic component to be selected in relation to the wider converter and board design.

Measurement, power handling and protection also become increasingly interconnected as electronic systems operate at higher voltages, faster switching speeds and greater power density. Bourns’ circuit-protection portfolio includes fuses, resettable devices, gas-discharge tubes, metal-oxide varistors, transient-voltage suppressors and other technologies used to address overcurrent, overvoltage, electrostatic-discharge and surge events. Rather than treating protection as a single-component decision, Bourns supports layered approaches in which different devices respond to different fault conditions, energy levels and time scales. Protection strategies can therefore be developed around circuit sensitivity, the expected electrical environment and the potential consequences of a fault.

The same combination of sensing, protection and power management is increasingly important within automotive electronics. Bourns designs and manufactures position, steering, fuel-level and speed sensors, together with AEC-Q200-compliant resistive, magnetic and circuit-protection products for battery-management systems, on-board chargers, power conversion and other vehicle applications.

Industrial, communications and medical systems introduce their own requirements involving accuracy, isolation, thermal performance, environmental exposure and long operating life. Bourns supports these applications through both standard and customer-specific products, allowing electrical characteristics, packaging and mechanical interfaces to be adapted where an established component does not fully address the design requirement.

Typical applications for Bourns technologies include automotive electronics, battery-management systems, power supplies, motor controls, industrial equipment, communications infrastructure, consumer electronics, medical devices, test equipment and audio systems.

Founded in 1947 and headquartered in Riverside, California, Bourns supports customers through a global network of engineering, manufacturing and sales operations. To learn more about Bourns and its electronic component technologies, please click here.

(Editor’s Note: All trademarks mentioned in this article, including company names, product names, and logos, are the property of their respective owners. Use of these trademarks is for informational purposes only and does not imply any endorsement.)

Molly Bakewell Chamberlin
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