Silicon Labs has introduced a series of isolated gate drivers to meet key requirements for cutting-edge power supply designs. The company said that based on Silicon Labs' proven digital isolation technology, the new Si827x ISOdriver series offers the highest noise immunity of any gate driver on the market.
Industry-leading common-mode transient immunity (CMTI) makes the Si827x drivers ideal for fast switching and potentially noisy power systems. Target applications include power supplies for servers, computers, and base stations, as well as solar inverters and micro-inverters, Class D amplifiers, motor controllers, and chargers for electric vehicles / hybrid electric vehicles (EV / HEV).
The primary indicator for power supply designers is power per volume (W / mm3). To maximize power density, many designers have chosen faster switching frequencies for their modulation schemes. Power transmission systems use high-power semiconductor switches, such as silicon-based MOSFETs and new gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) -based MOSFETs, which require large galvanic isolation drivers to control the switches. Fast switching improves system efficiency, but also produces higher noise transients, which can cause signal loss or latch-up and permanent damage. The Si827x gate driver protects the power system by providing excellent immunity to these transients caused by high-speed switching.
The Si827x gate driver has industry-leading noise immunity (200 kV / µs) and latch-up immunity (400 kV / µs), which is twice the level of immunity of any other gate driver today. The Si827x series products have high-performance anti-noise capability, which eliminates the risks caused by faster switching speeds and prevents modulation loss and latch-up, which is a major safety hazard. The extremely high latch specifications of the Si827x family make the gate driver extremely robust and prevent permanent latch damage.
The Si827x family offers two or two input isolated controls or a single isolated or dual isolated driver option for one input for power converter applications. These drivers can operate over a wide input VDD range of 2.5V to 5.5V with a maximum drive supply voltage of 30V. The low VDDI voltage capability of 2.5V enables developers to design lower-power low-voltage power systems, improving system efficiency, and being compatible with low-power microcontrollers (MCUs) such as Silicon Labs' EFM32 (TM) Gecko MCUs.
The Si827x gate driver has an EN (Enable High) pin instead of the typical DIS (Active Low) pin, undervoltage lockout (UVLO) fault protection, deburring function for filtering noise input and high accuracy Dead time (DT) pin) programmability. Using this DT function, developers can precisely control the "dead time" between two switch drivers to optimize the efficiency and safety of power systems.
"Silicon Labs' new Si827x gate driver family solves real-world customer issues and safely enables fast switching and low-power 2.5V operation with excellent timing specifications," said Ross Sabolcik, vice president of Silicon Labs power products. Our Si827x gate drivers have best-in-class noise immunity, enabling developers to safely design power systems with fast switching MOSFETs or faster GaN and SiC switches, which can significantly increase overall system efficiency while increasing reliability.
With Silicon Labs' proprietary capacitively coupled isolation technology, the Si827x gate driver has very low electromagnetic interference (EMI) emissions, long life, fast and accurate timing specifications, and a wide temperature range from -40C to + 125C.
