Kannan Soundarapandian and David Snook from TI talk to PSD about the company’s two new packaging announcements at APEC
Texas Instruments is gearing up for APEC with two big launches at this year’s event. What is unusual about them is that they both focus on packaging. The market demands that more and more power is concentrated into smaller spaces. This requirement is across the industry. Whether the application is in consumer goods, EVs, or data centres, designers are pressured to not only get solutions that work, but to get them as compact as possible. There are limits to how small switches can go and still supply the necessary power safely and efficiently, so more manufacturers are trying to integrate other components into the packaging. In this case, TI have incorporated the inductors in the first, while the second has increased integration and isolation.
Kannan Soundarapandian, Vice President & General Manager for high voltage products at TI explained, “MagPack is a package with integrated inductors that allows us to reduce footprint by 50% or more. This is extremely valuable, because as well as the decreased footprint size, we also get an associated reduction in EMC, and better immunity. The packaging technology is highly complex and somewhat unique. The second innovation on show at APEC is IsoShield technology, which enables the integration of a planar transformer into the IC together with the primary and secondary power stages, to give a fully integrated, isolated DC/DC module. Being able to integrate everything inside the package while also transferring power using an internal air core transformer makes the solution size extremely small.”
TI estimates that Isoshield will shrink solution size by as much as 70% while delivering up to 2W of power.
David Snook, Product Line Manager for drivers, bias & bi-directional GaN at TI expanded, “IsoShield technology will be developed to support all levels of isolation; functional, basic, reinforced, or whatever a customer application needs. The IsoShield power modules offer significant benefits to customers, including a reduction in size, height and weight, as well as an improvement in efficiency and thermal performance compared to existing modules and discrete solutions. Furthermore, the reduction in size enables different biasing architectures at the system level. Until now, it was easier for customers to have adopted a centralized bias architecture, which provided power to all the drivers across the system. The risk in that is you end up having a single point failure if the supply fails, and you have no bias supply for any of the power transistors in the system. A distributed architecture gives multiple points of failure. An IsoShield power module at each individual power transistor will greatly reduce the impact of a single device failure on how the overall system operates. Finally, these isolated power modules are extremely easy to use for customers. They are smaller, so more flexible to position on PCBs. They have reduced bond counts, so you don't need as many external components. We've also gone through a thorough validation qualification process to ensure that we meet all the requirements that typically cause problems, like EMI and meeting target efficiency or target output accurately. That plug and play play aspect is a big benefit for customers.”
At APEC, TI will feature isolated power modules with IsoShield technology in a high-power, high-performance automotive silicon carbide (SiC) 300kW traction inverter reference design.
