April 24, 2012 – Silicon Laboratories Inc. (NASDAQ: SLAB, Country Manager Jong-Chan Lee), a global leader in high-performance analog-intensive mixed-signal ICs, today announced the web-based Isolator Power Consumption Calculator, which supports efficient system power budgeting for applications requiring digital isolation. This free online utility enables developers to define basic information about isolation settings and calculate power consumption within minutes.

This power consumption calculator is particularly helpful for power-sensitive and temperature-constrained designs in small areas, such as industrial process modules or programmable logic controllers. In these or similar designs, developers must accurately understand the power consumption of all components within the system, including digital isolators.

This calculator is intuitive and easy to use. To obtain detailed power and current data, users simply need to select the settings appropriate for their design, such as the total number of channels, VDD supply voltage, and individual channel parameters, and click the 'View Results' button.

Developers can deduce power specifications from data sheets or estimate some insulation parameters by deriving more in-depth calculations without accessing such tools. This calculator tool eliminates the guessing process. Instead of spending hours studying data sheets, this utility shortens the entire process to minutes by making decisions based on system characteristics to determine the impact on the system power budget based on the parameters.

Ross Sabolcik, Product Line Manager for Digital Isolation Products at Silicon Labs, said, “System developers are very busy. We developed an isolation power consumption calculator to help streamline their design process. We believe that this web-based utility will make developers’ work much easier, enabling more efficient system development and faster time-to-market.”

This isolator power consumption calculator is available for free at www.silabs.com/isolator-power-calculator . Developers can use it online or download it for offline use. This calculator is one of several web-based utilities developed by Silicon Labs to simplify system design. http://www.silabs.com/support/training/pages/default.aspx

About Silicon Labs' Digital Isolator

Silicon Labs' Si84xx and Si86xx digital isolator families reduce Bill of Materials (BoM) costs by up to 50% by being one-third the size of optocoupler solutions, and utilize a superior RF isolation architecture fabricated with standard CMOS to deliver highly integrated 1- to 6-channel isolators. These digital isolators provide a smaller, faster, and more stable isolation solution than optocouplers, without the drawbacks of optocouplers such as wear mechanisms, aging, or temperature dependence. Silicon Labs' digital isolators employ RF couplers to transmit digital information across isolation barriers, enabling very fast operation at low power levels. Additionally, these isolators provide best-in-class immunity to electromagnetic interference (EMI) among other digital isolation solutions.

Silicon Labs' digital isolators are designed to replace optocouplers in applications requiring superior performance and high levels of isolation protection, such as industrial automation, drives, motor control, and medical systems. These isolators are also ideal isolation solutions for solar panel microconverters, data communication systems, hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs), as well as 220VAC main power supply systems such as isolated AC-DC and DC-DC power supplies.