Fairchild Adds High-Speed, Low-Side Gate Drivers For Power Supply Designs

Fairchild Semiconductor announced its FAN31xx and FAN32xx high-speed low-side gate drivers, which the company says offer maximum flexibility for power supply designs, providing a wide selection of features and packaging to create what is described as compact, highly efficient and reliable power supplies.

The devices are available in either what the company describes as the industry’s smallest MLP packaging or industry-standard SOT and SOIC packaging. With the additional flexibility offered by input-threshold and package choices, two inputs per channel, plus a higher voltage range, short propagation delays, and delay matching between channels, the company claims that power-supply designs can be further optimized in terms of efficiency, reliability, power density and cost.

The series of high-speed low-side gate drivers consist of the FAN3100 single 2A gate drivers, and the FAN32xx family of dual 2 and 4A gate drivers. These products are specialized amplifiers that drive the gate of a switching power MOSFET or IGBT to quickly turn it on or off according to the input signal. The dual drivers feature matched internal propagation delays between the two channels for applications such as synchronous rectifiers with critical timing needs. This matched internal propagation delay also enables a designer to connect the two channels in parallel, doubling the current capability for driving a single MOSFET.

These low-side gate drivers utilize a lead-free (Pb-free) finish and have been characterized for moisture sensitivity in accordance with the Pb-free reflow requirements of the joint IPC/JEDEC standard J-STD-020. All of Fairchild’s products are designed to meet the requirements of the European Union’s Directive on the restriction of the use of certain substances (RoHS).

Pricing starts at $0.49 for quantities of 1,000, with a delivery time of 8 weeks ARO.