Protection of industrial equipment from secondary lightning strikes

Silicon Labs announced the launch of a new family of multichannel digital isolators. Based on Silicon Labs' proprietary capacitive isolation technology, the new Si86xxxT digital isolator family provides robust protection capable of withstanding secondary lightning strikes.

Silicon Labs' Si86xxxT digital isolator family provides relatively fast and accurate timing specifications under high voltage, high noise immunity and reliability, low electromagnetic noise emissions, and a long product lifespan.

The Si86xxxT digital isolator is suitable for applications that must withstand 10 kV surges, such as microinverters, base station power supplies, process manufacturing equipment, motor control and drives, industrial UPS (uninterruptible power supplies), metering equipment, and battery management systems for electric vehicles.

Developers of industrial applications expect reinforced insulation products that provide fail-safe protection to withstand secondary lightning strikes, especially in applications where equipment is installed outdoors or cables or wires are exposed to areas vulnerable to lightning.

In addition to requiring surge immunity up to 10 kV, developers of industrial equipment require insulation products that provide a wide VDD and temperature range. The Si86xxxT family meets these design requirements.



Acquired Reinforced VDE , also contributed to standardization

The Si86xxxT family features a wide-body package that covers a diverse range of devices from 2 to 4 channels. It is also pin-compatible with Silicon Labs' existing digital isolators as well as competitor isolation products, offering advantages over existing isolation technologies in terms of actual data rates, propagation delay, power, size, reliability, and the bill of material (BOM) for external components.

Performance against 10 kV surges enabled the Si86xxxT isolator to qualify as a “Reinforced VDE” component. “Reinforced VDE” components are a standard that is important in numerous applications, including industrial, telecom, and automotive.

All Si86xxxT digital isolator products provide a Schmitt trigger input for high noise immunity, and since these highly integrated devices require only a VDD bypass capacitor, BOM costs and complexity are reduced. Si86xxxT devices support data rates up to 150 Mbps with a propagation delay of 10 ns. The enable input allows the output drive to be enabled/disabled.