Microsemi Photovoltaic (PV) Solutions
Harness Your Power
Renewable energy is more important than ever, with governments around the world offering grants and tax incentives to encourage and support its development. Microsemi contributes by offering an extensive range of solutions for the photovoltaic (PV) market, supporting a wide array of applications in power harvesting, power management, power switching and power monitoring. With these products the PV designer can develop highly efficient and reliable, cost sensitive applications to meet the ever increasing demand of PV deployments worldwide. Microsemi carries an assortment of analog, mixed signal and digital devices, such as bypass diodes/switches, MOSFETs and IGBTs, DC-DC converters, mixed signal FPGAs, PWM modules and much more. The following sections provide details for each application segment: Power Harvesting, Power Management and Control, Power Switches and Power Monitoring.
Award Winning Bypass Solution
The LX2400 IDEAL™ Solar Bypass device with Microsemi's patented CoolRUN™ technology provides a bypass path in PV module applications. With the industry's lowest forward voltage drop, resulting in negligible heat generation and temperature rise during operation, the LX2400 is best in class for reliability and robustness.
- Negligible heat generation – Less than 10°C rise at 10 A
- High reliability – Designed for 30 year product life
- Extreme environment survivability - Fully functional from -50°C to +150°C
- IEC61215, section 10.18 compliant
World's Thinnest Solar Diodes
At only 0.74 mm high, Microsemi's new Schottky barrier PV bypass diodes are the thinnest in the world. Designed specifically for solar panels, the SFDS series 10 A diodes are packaged with unique flexible copper leads that have satellite-proven reliability.
- 0.74 mm thick
- 10 A solar bypass diode
- Weld or solder mountable under glass panel
- Can eliminate junction box or reduce junction box size
Standard Package Devices
Microsemi offers a wide range of Schottky bypass diodes in axial, surface mount and through-hole devices. The standard current ranges are 10 – 18 A and 20 – 45 V, but Microsemi can design and build custom devices up to 60 A and up to 200 V.
Mixed Signal and Low Power FPGAs
Design techniques such as pulse-width modulation (PWM) are used widely to convert from DC to AC. Microsemi's programmable logic devices allow for an increased number of PWM state machines as compared to current DSPs. Losses due to heat must be minimized, so flash-based low power technology is a big advantage, reducing operational expense in the form of smaller chassis fans.
Providing higher levels of integration while keeping footprint, power and cost down is a key advantage. Microsemi's product offering of low power and mixed signal FPGAs is ideal for helping inverter designers integrate more board-level functionality into a smaller footprint.
Pulse-Width Modulation
- Microsemi's ultra low power flash FPGAs are ideal for implementing PWMs commonly used in inverter topologies.
Low Power Consumption
- With power consumption as low as 2 µW, you have the assurance that your energy conversion efforts will not be wasted in unnecessary heat loss.
Protect Your Hard Work
- Microsemi's single-chip flash FPGAs protect your IP through 256-bit AES encryption and DPA countermeasures.
- Handles both algorithm and supervisory
- Mixed signal integration
Low Profile Modules
With 26 years of experience in the power semiconductor module industry, Microsemi develops and manufactures semiconductor inverter modules with mix-and-match components and assembly materials to offer the best combination of cost, size, performance and reliability. Microsemi also offers a complete range of input and output diode bridge modules (recovery diodes, FRED and SiC diodes). Boost and buck choppers and resonant inverter topologies are available in the same low profile packages.
Discrete Switching Solution
The new 600 V CoolMOS™ C6 devices feature fifth-generation high voltage superjuntion technology for extremely low conduction and switching losses, thus enabling the design of switching systems having new levels of efficiency and power density. CoolMOS C6 devices are easy to design in, more compact, lighter and cooler. They are well suited for high power, high performance switch mode applications.
The new MOS 8™ IGBT has been optimized for low frequency operation (10 KHz — 30 KHz), where conduction loss dominates overall system losses. The MOS 8 PT IGBZT portfolio already provides low conduction loss options at 2.0 V (600 VBR(CES)) and 2.5 V (900 VBR(CES)). The new APT44GA60BD30C reduces this to 1.5 V, enabling further increases in overall system efficiency for 600V designs. Input is rated at 44 A with a 38 A maximum recommended at 10 KHz and 27 A at 30 KHz. Microsemi's ultra fast reverse recovery DQ diode is incorporated as an anti-parallel free wheeling diode.
- Low cost
- Simple gate driver circuitry
- Fast switching
- Ultra fast recover Combi diode for zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) topologies
DC–DC Regulators and Controllers
Microsemi's growing DC-to-DC product family supports up to 40 V input voltages across a wide range of current output, up to 40 amps. The family includes switching regulators with built-in power FETs as well as controllers that use external power FETs and can operate at frequencies up to 2 MHz.
Smart Meter Power Management Capability
Microsemi's power IC design group has extensive experience developing custom and standard off-the-shelf power management ICs. Key features of recently developed products include:
- Battery management
- Power failure, over-current and thermal detection
- Temperature compensation
- Power reset
- Energy conservation during power loss
Contact your local Microsemi sales representative for more information on our solutions for this exciting new technology.
Mixed Signal and Low Power FPGAs
Understanding energy consumption and providing the ability to change usage models in real time is being made possible by smart meters. Technological advances such as the mixed signal SmartFusion FPGA, which includes an analog front-end, embedded processor and programmable logic fabric in a single IC platform, gives designers the ability to develop smart meter systems that meet current and future needs.
A single computing platform that includes a processor and FPGA fabric gives the designer flexibility to partition designs into software and hardware elements. The embedded ARM® Cortex™-M3 operates at 100 MHz, provides 125 Drhystone MIPs performance and includes up to 512 Kb flash memory and 128 Kb of SRAM. These abundant resources provide the ability to tackle system-level algorithms such as power management, communication interfaces, and encryption.
- Accurate real-time load data
- Secure two-way communication to a host network or the internet
- Ability to connect/disconnect non-essential loads dependent on preset parameters or user feedback
- Rugged, reliable, low power operation
