As information was being gathered, Company K was approached with a new project for developing tablet terminals for use in health care sites, and they were entrusted with the design of the main boards for these terminals. The selling point for these new tablet terminals was that they were to be the one of the best in low power consumption among competing products.
Because of this, since the circuits already designed by the company did not meet the required specifications, the company had to develop a new product, even though there was little time left to design it.
When the company finally finished a prototype board, they began to evaluate it. However, even after many attempts, the board still failed to reach the target battery operation time, and the design team members scrambled to pin down the cause of the problem.
The evaluations were repeated, and the company discovered that the low conversion efficiency rate of the DC-DC converter was to blame. They decided to study a variety of power inductors, a key component.
As a result of their efforts, the team found that the conversion efficiency changes when the power inductors are changed, and they realized that these components were definitely having an effect of some kind. However, the team was unable to identify which power inductors could achieve the highest conversion efficiency and meet the target specifications, and even after a lot of time passed, the company was still unable to select a power inductor.