Electronics Weekly
Hades v2 brings reliability and extended life time in harsh environments like aeronautics, automotive, industrial and oil & gas market, the company claims.
It is available in hermetic packages for extreme temperature applications up to 225°C, as well as in plastic packages for systems where extended life time is the priority and temperature doesn’t exceed 175°C.
Hades v2 gate driver includes all the functions to drive the gates of power switches in an isolated, high voltage half bridge. According to the company it maximises the benefit of fast switching SiC power transistors.
The chipset uses three ICs: Hades2P on the primary side, Hades2S on the secondary, and the recently introduced quad-diode Elara. Both primary and secondary chips come in ceramic QFP 32 pins or in plastic QFP 44 pins.
The primary side IC (Hades2P) embeds a current-mode fly-back controller with an integrated 0.8Ω – 80V switch, configurable non-overlapping and under-voltage lockout (UVLO) fault management. It also includes a four channels isolated signal transceiver (2 Tx and 2 Rx) for PWM and fault signals transmission towards or back from secondary side through tiny pulse transformers.
The two secondary side ICs (Hades2S), one for the high side and one for the low side, include a 12A driver, UVLO, desaturation and over temperature protection (OTP) fault detection circuits, as well as a two channels isolated signal transceiver.
An evaluation kit (EVK-Hades2) is also available, which demonstrates a half-bridge built on the Hades v2 gate driver and two Cissoid’s Neptune, a 10A/1200V SiC mosfet. The kit includes a demonstration board with the half-bridge and the full documentation. The board is only 60x55mm (2.4×2.2 inches). Hades v2 can drive higher power and other types of switches, including IGBTs and traditional mosfets. Support for GaN transistors is also foreseen in the near future.
According to the company the thermal robustness of Hades v2 offers designers the freedom to locate the gate driver next to the power transistors, minimising parasitic inductances, allowing fast switching and low switching losses. Reduced switching losses allow higher operating frequencies and result in a reduction of the size and weight of the capacitors and magnetic components. Furthermore, high operating temperatures reduce the cooling requirements and hence size and weight of the system.
Hades v2 chipset has been optimised to minimise the number and size of active and passive components to make possible its integration inside intelligent power modules (IPMs) where the gate driver is next to the power switches, says Cissoid. Hades integration into IPMs will further increase converters power density and enables reliable operation up to high temperature, either for very long lifetime (tens of years) in 100°C-175°C applications, or for thousands of hours at extreme temperature applications (175°C-225°C).
