Power Supplies Need Power Backplanes

A backplane is a number of connectors that are connected with each other in parallel combination. This type of connection makes a computer bus and is used as a backbone to form a computer system. Disk enclosures, disk arrays, and servers are found to use backplanes.

To provide flexibility in the interface, power supplies need power backplanes. For this reason, to make a redundant power supply there’s no need to modify any cost sensitive backplanes.

Required power supply can be acquired using a number of power backplanes. Either AC or DC power is supplied to the power planes with the help of proper connector. There are also ATX-style power connectors available to supply regulated power. They can provide large supply currents when needed in a variety of applications.

Backplanes Expand Motherboard Functionality

Backplane is a group of similar connectors connected in parallel to each other so that every pin of each connector is linked to the same relative pin on the other connector forming a computer bus. This technique is used to connect several PCBs to make up a complete computer system. Backplanes are preferred over the cable connectors because of their high reliability and ease. A cable may fail mechanically each time when a card is added where as a backplane does not suffer from this type of failures. A backplane uses plug-in cards for processing and storage. Backplanes are used with a motherboard to expand the functionality and provide more slots for expansion cards. Server computers usually use backplanes for attaching hot swappable hard drives. There are other types of backplanes like butterfly backplane due to the structural variation. A backplane provides the same funcionality as a motherboard when it is used with a single board computer (SCB) or single host board (SHB).