FEATURE POWER
SOLVING SOLAR SYSTEMS
Switching losses are a key concern for circuit designers, with power being wasted between transitions. Derek Kroes, vice president of engineering, and Bruce Renouard, chief executive officer, Pre-Switch, offer their insights into this area, touching on their latest technology: the Pre-Flex FPGA
T
hat climate change is real is accepted by the great majority of
the world’s scientific community. One of the most pressing challenges is developing environmentally-friendly, energy generating subsystems, and great strides have been made with solar and wind power energy plants in this regard. Yet, there is still a need to increase efficiency and reduce system costs. On this, Pre-Switch has announced a soft-switching IGBT and silicon carbide gate driver architecture that promises to significantly reduce the cost of solar inverters by minimising switching losses. Hard-switching is the most commonly-used technique for DC/AC power converters, but it has numerous drawbacks, including the aforementioned switching losses - wasted energy produced while a transistor fully transitions between on and off states: these switching losses are responsible for
a large percentage of power converter losses. In contrast, soft-switching minimises loss but has never been successfully implemented for DC/AC systems with varying duty cycle, input voltage, temperature and load conditions. Pre-Switch has developed its
Pre-Flex FPGA with embedded artificial intelligence (AI), which accurately controls the timing of auxiliary resonant switches, inductors, and capacitors to ensure that ZVS or ZCS soft-switching continues independently of changes in bus voltages, temperature, device tolerances, device degradation or load currents. Pre-Flex also incorporates Pre-Switch Blink, a set of advanced safety features that monitor device performance, continuously communicating the data through an integrated serial port. Pre-Switch Blink also provides redundant device protection and DeSat protection execution that
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