Intersil intros industry’s first radiation hardened 12V input point of load switching regulator

MILPITAS, USA: Intersil Corp. announced the industry's first radiation hardened 12V input point-of-load (POL) synchronous buck switching regulator capable of operating over an input voltage range of 3.0 to 13.2V for aerospace and satellite power applications.

The ISL70003SEH synchronous buck switching regulator is a highly integrated single-chip power management solution that increases power system efficiency. The ISL70003SEH improves thermal performance while reducing the number of required external components to streamline design and qualification time.

Leveraging proprietary design, process and testing techniques that Intersil has refined over many decades, the new ISL70003SEH switching regulator offers robust reliability and accuracy to support the most demanding POL voltage tolerance requirements and to withstand low-dose rate and high-dose rate ionizing radiation found in harsh environments.

The continued increase in satellite complexity, with more low and high voltage rail requirements and increased computing power demands, presents a number of new challenges to system designers who must balance demands for increased system efficiency and improved thermal performance while ensuring fail-proof operation under extreme conditions.

Intersil's ISL70003SEH switching regulator helps to address these design issues by delivering world-class efficiency through the integration of upper and lower switching MOSFETs and an advanced packaging technique that eliminates the need for an external heat sink.

Synchronous rectification topology allows for seamless switching between MOSFETs which dramatically improves efficiency and thermal management, reducing power loss. The ISL70003SEH uses voltage mode control architecture with feed-forward, and switches at a selectable frequency of 500kHz or 300kHz. Loop compensation is externally adjustable to allow for an optimum balance between stability and output dynamic performance.

The high level of integration allows one part to work on both high and low voltage rails so designers can use the same part across many applications, minimizing both qualification and design time. The ISL70003SEH switching regulator also integrates a buffer amplifier for use in double data rate (DDR) power applications, which minimizes the number of discrete components to save board space, reduce the overall weight of the satellite and reduce system cost.

Leveraging Intersil's proprietary design, process and testing techniques, the ISL70003SEH switching regulator provides designers with a highly reliable and accurate power management solution that achieves the stringent +/- 5 percent voltage accuracy required by FPGAs, ASICs, microprocessors and microcontrollers in space applications.

With superior radiation hardness, the ISL70003SEH achieves a +/- 1 percent reference voltage variation over line, temperature and radiation. The ISL70003SEH's excellent single event transient (SET) response effectively minimizes output voltage variation and increases accuracy, resulting in +/- 3 percent SET performance. In addition, the switching regulator's 14.7V absolute maximum rating in the heavy ion environment at a linear energy transfer (LET) of 86MeV-cm2/mg provides an adequate de-rating margin for 12V applications, which improves system reliability.