Silicon Laboratories Inc., a leader in high-performance, analog-intensive, mixed-signal ICs, introduced the industry’s first drop-in replacement for optocouplers based on mainstream CMOS technology and incorporating an innovative light-emitting diode (LED) emulator input. The new Si87xx digital isolators offer a perfect pin configuration, package and footprint fit for a number of optocoupler products while offering superior noise immunity, more robust performance and greater reliability, making them ideal for solar power inverters, switched mode power supplies (SMPS), uninterruptible power supplies (UPS), industrial drives, programmable logic controllers (PLCs), high-voltage medical equipment and other applications that often use optocouplers.
Used for more than 40 years, optocouplers are inherently limited by outdated LED-based technology, which exhibits significant output variation over input current, temperature and age. These variations reduce the operating performance and reliability over the optocoupler’s lifetime, resulting in increased design complexity and shorter life expectancy for end products. Because of their aging effects, optocouplers are often specified to last only 10 years, posing a serious problem for industrial system designers who want to develop products with 20+ year warranties.
Silicon Labs’ Si87xx opto-replacement devices use a patented CMOS-based isolation architecture that is completely immune to the output variations that plague LED-based optocouplers. CMOS-based capacitive isolation technology provides more than ten times the mean-time-to-failure (MTTF) rate of optocouplers.
Silicon Laboratories
www.silabs.com