Digital isolator protects the missing link

The Si844x is billed as the industry's highest-performance easiest-to-use lowest-cost 2500V RMS digital isolator product family.

Silicon Laboratories has expanded its digital power product portfolio with the Si844x, the industry's highest-performance, easiest-to-use, lowest-cost 2500V RMS digital isolator product family.

The patent-pending Si844x uses chip-scale transformers fabricated in a standard, 100% CMOS to deliver a highly integrated four channel isolator that is one-third the size of competing optocoupler solutions reducing the bill-of-material cost by as much as 50%.

The Si844x offers 50% faster datarates than existing digital isolators and consumes less than 12mA per channel at 100Mbit/s, making it ideal for applications such as switch mode power supplies, Ethernet/CAN networks and isolated analogue data acquisition.

The Si844x single-chip solution greatly simplifies circuit layout design compared with other isolation technologies implemented with multiple discrete components.

Based on a patented architecture, the Si844x achieves the highest level of performance using a unique RF encoding/decoding scheme that provides a robust isolated datapath and requires no special consideration or initialisation.

Whereas traditional isolation methods are notoriously slow and exhibit changing operating characteristics with temperature and time, the Si844x products are as much as 1500x faster than other isolation technologies and exhibit stable operating characteristics over temperature, supply voltage and time.

"Silicon Laboratories' Si844x digital isolators stand out as one of the more exciting new products", said Chris Ambarian, Senior Analyst in Power Management with iSuppli.

"iSuppli has long been saying that one of the real challenges to realising a lower system cost using digitalised power techniques would be to find a way to transfer a lot of data from layer to layer within the system, with negligible propagation delay and, of course, cost-effectively".

"It seems that Silicon Laboratories has just provided the missing link in our vision of exactly what the next generation of power hardware architectures need".

"The Si844x is an extension of Silicon Laboratories' innovative digital power product portfolio and leverages patented technology to deliver highly integrated power solutions with unmatched performance", said Don Alfano, Director of Power Products for Silicon Laboratories.

"The digital isolator enables us to increase our offering to power supply customers by offering a single-chip, fully compliant solution that can be used in a variety of applications that require isolation, level shifting or ground-loop elimination".

The product family includes the four-channel Si8440, Si8441 and the Si8442, all of which are offered in 16-pin wide-body small outline IC packages (SOIC) that are pin-for-pin compatible with competing solutions.

The Si8840 offers four forward channels whereas the Si8441 offers three forward channels and one reverse channel, and the Si8442 offers two forward channels and two reverse channels.

The Si844x products are fully specification compliant with Underwriters Laboratories UL1577 (USA), VDE Testing and Certification Institute VDE60747-5-2 (Europe) and CSA's Component Acceptance Service CSA No 5A (Canada).

Pricing for the Si844x family begins at $2.44 in quantities of 1000.

Samples are available now and production is scheduled for Q2 2006.

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