National Semiconductor and Silicon Laboratories quarter-brick board

National Semiconductor and Silicon Laboratories have announced a quarter-brick isolated DC-DC converter evaluation board and reference design to help power supply designers get higher power density in networking, communications and high-end server applications.

Featuring National Semiconductor’s LM5035C pulse-width modulation controller and Silicon Labs’ Si8420 ISOpro digital isolator, the isolator DC-DC converter evaluation board provides power supply designers with a 100 W reference design.

The evaluation board reduces the time required for product characterisation and design adaptation to the user’s specific requirements.

The reference design demonstrates a 36 to 75 V input half-bridge converter for power module or embedded power applications. The design survives input transients up to 100 V as commonly required in communications equipment and protects the power distribution system with hiccup-mode fault protection.

The controller includes integrated 2 A half-bridge gate drivers and SyncFET outputs that control the secondary-side synchronous rectifier MOSFETs through the Si8420 digital isolator.

The digital isolators employ RF technology to communicate data across an isolation barrier. Using the Si8420 in place of pulse transformers eliminates numerous design issues such as duty cycle limitations and non-monotonic decay of output during shutdown.