EL SEGUNDO, CA. July 1999 - Continuing their development of power conversion components designed specifically for Motor Control applications, International Rectifier (IR®) has announced a set of new power conversion components designed to make motor drives of up to five horsepower (3.8 kW) more efficient, while simplifying the design of gate drive circuitry, and offering protection for the motors and motor drives from transient/fault conditions during shutdown.

The new devices include:

Both devices are optimized for use in motor drives of up to 5HP, and provide a 20 percent improvement when compared with previous IR devices, which currently set the performance standard in the marketplace for these applications.

"Both of these developments further improve IR's industry leading position in 1200V power technologies for the motor drive industry," said Gabe Gotthard, vice president of marketing for Switch Products at IR.

In addition to a >20 percent efficiency improvement, the new Co-Pack also dramatically improves SOA (Safe Operating Area) and performance under short circuit conditions. The improved SOA performance helps to reduce or eliminate snubbing requirements.

The IR2213 and IR2233 Gate Driver ICs are the only 1200V ICs commercially available to the industry. They are pin-for-pin equivalent to their 600V industry standard counterparts, IR2113 and IR2133.

"As a result, using these new products in a motor drive to reduce system size and snubbing requirements could easily result in a potential system cost savings of up to 20 percent while producing a far more reliable and safer product," Gotthard claimed.

The IR2213 Half-Bridge Gate Driver IC is housed in 14-pin DIP or SOIC. The IR2233 Three-Phase Gate Driver IC is housed in a 44-pin PLCC package. Both products are in volume production already.

New generations of Three-Phase Gate Driver ICs are also being readied, which include integrated ground fault protection with soft shutdown feature that minimizes excessive voltage spike during short circuit turn-off condition. Samples of the 600V IR2137 are available in July and the 1200V IR2237 will be available in September.

The new IRGP25A120KD IGBT/FRD Co-Packs (rated at 1200V and 25A, in the TO-247 package) will also be available for sampling in late July with production following in September. Customers may also order die pairs rated at 25, 50, 75 and 100A for use in multi-chip modules in the same time frame.

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