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Power Integrations offers highly integrated IGBT drivers. Based on decades of experience, ASICs have been developed for the driver and monitoring functions, which together with the inductive transformers form the core of the drivers. Extensive application design support is offered.

Highly integrated driver components: cheaper than discrete in-house development

MOSFETs and IGBTs are convenient to drive with low power, unlike bipolar power semiconductors. However, high gate capacitances must be recharged and, in the case of stacked IGBTs for HVDC (high-voltage DC transmission), large potential differences must also be bridged. In addition, there are protection functions for the power semiconductors and a negative bias voltage for IGBTs to be blocked so that they cannot switch through and fail as a result of transients in bridge circuits.

In view of the high voltages, some know-how is required here. For example, special regulations on insulation clearances, clearances and creepage distances, and partial discharge resistance must be observed, and these must also be checked with expensive measuring equipment. Likewise, the degradation of the board substrate and the migration of metal ions in it must be taken into account, which can otherwise lead to premature short circuits and total failures.

Instead of launching costly in-house developments, it makes sense here to use proven, safe driver modules designed using in-house developed, monolithic highly integrated semiconductor components as well as proprietary planar transformers, such as those offered by Power Integrations under the name SCALE (which stands for Scaleable, Compact, All-purpose, Low-cost and Easy-to-use). Power Integrations, previously CONCEPT, has been developing IGBT driver solutions for over 30 years and therefore has unrivaled experience with this topic.

The SCALE devices are driven with standard logic levels from 3.3 to 15 V and are very economical in the IGBT field: they are cheaper and more reliable than conventional discrete circuit designs, especially when it comes to driving high-voltage IGBTs. Thus HY-LINE Power Components offers you everything around inverters and high performance DC/DC converters from one source.

Power Integrations offers both general modules, the SCALE Driver Cores, and modules adapted to specific IGBT modules, the SCALE Plug-and-Play Drivers. In addition, there are the monolithically integrated SCALE iDriver chips.