Avago Expands Portfolio of R2Couplers Isolation Products for Automotive
Avago Technologies announced the addition of three new isolation optocouplers to their R2Coupler™ family. These new automotive optocouplers provide safe isolation for electric vehicle (EV) and hybrid/electric vehicle (HEV) applications such as onboard charging systems and powertrain inverters in these vehicles while extending the working voltage range of existing R2Couplers optocouplers. These new devices provide high integration of functions in modules, isolated smart gate drives, analog sensing and digital communications.
Powertrain inverters, onboard chargers and DC-DC converters draw on gate drives for driving power devices like MOSFETs and IGBTs. They need isolation amplifiers to sense high voltage bus levels and digital isolation to communicate status and feedback information from the high voltage side of the optocoupler to the microprocessor on the low voltage side.
"With industry trends targeting higher continuous isolation working voltage levels and higher levels of integration, our new optocouplers show our knowledge and commitment to these trends," said Cheng-Dee Lee, Business and Applications Development Director for Isolation Products at Avago. "By expanding our portfolio with enhanced feature sets and addressing isolation needs across markets, OEMs can easily balance their flexible design requirements. This allows them to meet the continual component challenge of integration that in turn reduces module size and volume of their end products."
The high voltage, high current switching generates a noisy environment. Optocouplers are very suitable with their immunity against high dV/dt transient noise, as well as immunity against electro-magnetic coupling from the high current cables. By providing safe isolation for all isolation needs in EV and HEV applications there is an improvement in power efficiency and a reduction in system power loss.
Addressing Industry Trends
Current automotive systems operate at approximately 400V with future systems moving towards 700V to 800V. These new optocouplers are rated for continuous working voltages of 1140V or higher, more than sufficient to meet future needs. Avago optocouplers are proven in the automotive field and have established component safety regulatory standards (UL1577, CSA, IEC 60747-5-5). These standards certify high voltage lifetime and robustness to transients specifically for optocouplers. The new Avago R2Coupler products, along with the complete family are still the only optocouplers that are qualified to TS 16949 and AEC Q100, quality standards and guidelines reference by the automotive supply chain.
New Products and Feature Sets
* ACPL-34JT is an isolated gate drive with many smart functions and features incorporated to improve integration
* ACPL-C87AT/C87BT isolation amplifier provides instrumentation amplifier performance with integrated isolation
* ACPL-K7xT provides single and dual channel to enhance configurability and manage space savings
