New Industry Products

Intersil Releases High Current MOSFET Gate Drivers

May 18, 2008 by Jeff Shepard

Intersil Corp. announced the release of the ISL6615 and ISL6615A. These high-frequency 6A sink synchronous MOSFET gate drivers are said to provide greater efficiency, dramatic flexibility and added protection features for system safety.

The new drivers have increased gate drive currents (4A source and sink gate drive currents for UGATE and 4A source with 6A sink on LGATE) to reduce gate voltage rise and fall times. This minimizes switching losses and improves efficiency, especially in high current applications in which power MOSFETs are placed in parallel per phase.

The ISL6615 and ISL6615A also support both 9.6 and 12V input rails. In addition, designers can choose versions of the device which support 3.3V PWM signals (ISL6615) or 5V PWM signals (ISL6615A). Each device has a wide input voltage operating range of 5 to 12V and each is pin-for-pin compatible with Intersil’s previous generation ISL6594D.

With multiple protection features like bootstrap capacitor overcharging prevention, a tri-state PWM input for safe output stage shutdown, pre-POR overvoltage protection and VCC undervoltage protection, the ISL6615 and ISL6615A help protect the system.

The devices are optimized for POL dc-dc converters for IBA Systems, core regulators for Intel® and AMD® microprocessors; and high current low-profile dc-dc converters