Provides fast delivery delay, powerful drive, and excellent compatibility

TI Korea (CEO Kent Tran) announced the release of an isolated gate driver.

Isolated gate drivers are becoming increasingly important components due to the recent surge in applications switching between low and high voltages. This is because next-generation industries are shifting toward industrial automation and control, where energy efficiency is more critical than ever. As power devices operate at high voltages, noise also increases, making the use of isolated gate drivers essential. Consequently, there has been a significant increase in the launch of new products by many semiconductor companies.

The description TI attached to this new product—that it is the industry's "fastest" isolated gate driver for "high voltage" applications—can be seen as an effort to emphasize differentiation from these companies.

The reason TI stated that this is the first product in its new gate driver family also speaks to how much effort it is putting into High Power. TI has expanded the isolated product family, which originally belonged to the chip-level division, into a High Power product family. This means that, unlike competitors, they intend to focus on high-power product lines in rapidly growing industries, such as the automotive sector.

Dual channels of 5.7kVRMS, withstands withstands a maximum withstand voltage of 12.8kV

The newly released isolated gate driver (UCC21520) is the industry's fastest dual-channel product with a 5.7kVRMS output and is designed to flexibly handle voltage withstand voltages up to 12.8kV. It can also be used as an isolated driver in low-side, high-side, high-side/low-side, or half-bridge power management designs.

Common-mode transient immunity of over 100 V/ns protects finished products from conditions commonly encountered in data centers, factories, and other high-voltage environments. It also provides the fastest propagation delay of 19ns and tight inter-channel delay matching of less than 5ns. Particularly for compact solutions, the UCC21520 offers high power density with 4A source and 6A sink currents, reducing switching losses in high-frequency switch-mode power applications through fast rise times of 6ns and fast fall times of 7ns for 1.8nF loads.


Another point worth noting is that this single driver is sufficient even for various applications with different input voltages. This is because it supports programmable dead-time control with a wide input voltage range of 3V to 18V, dual channeling, and output parallelization.

"The newly released driver IC improves energy efficiency with a low standby power of 1mA per channel," said Jinwoo Cho, a manager at TI Korea (pictured) . "Since fields such as automation, wireless, cloud, and enterprise networks are bound to move toward high power, TI will focus on high-power product lines."

Meanwhile, TI provides various support tools for the UCC21520 to help accelerate time-to-market. Development can begin quickly by using the UCC21520EVM-286 evaluation module and PSpice/SIMPLIS transient response models. Additionally, TI Designs provides a reference design (TIDA-00366).