I had a relatively long talk with Klause about his
"Plasma" ignition system. Turns out is is a multiple
spark capacitor discharge system with a twist.

It was designed by Paul Lipps. Paul came up with a very
interesting idea. Instead of only one capacitor and high 
voltage switching FET he uses multiple capacitors and 
multiple switching FETs. I made a little sketch of the
set up.  The advantage is it takes time to charge the capacitor
so that limits how fast you can fire multiple sparks.
At high RPM the delay is unacceptable as the second
spark is delayed to the point where the ignition advance
angle is seriously degraded. 

With this system you can fire multiple sparks in quick
succession. Best of both worlds. Low power consumption,
lots of spark energy when you need it and best of all a 
fast rise time to punch through lead fouling. Nothing a 
one dollar PIC microcomputer cannot handle. The big cost item is 
the FETs at around five dollars each. We are talking
12 of them here. Of course you get tremendous redundancy
here for your money. Any one of the 12 FETs could fail and 
you might not notice it. I simulated the FETs with a simple
switch in this sketch for the schematic challenged among you.

Paul Lamar
 
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