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Lost Secrets of the H-Bridge, Part I: Ripple Current in Inductive Loads

Jason Sachs July 8, 2013

So you think you know about H-bridges? They're something I mentioned in my last post about signal processing with Python.

Here we have a typical H-bridge with an inductive load. (Mmmmm ahhh! It's good to draw by hand every once in a while!) There are four power switches: QAH and QAL connecting node A to the DC link, and QBH and QBL connecting node B to the DC link. The load is connected between nodes A and B, and here is represented by an inductive load in series with something else. We...


Hot Fun in the Silicon: Thermal Testing with Power Semiconductors

Jason Sachs April 20, 2012

Here's a trick that is useful the next time you do thermal testing with your MOSFETs or IGBTs.

Thermal testing?!

Yes, that's right. It's important to make sure your power transistors don't overheat. In the datasheet, you will find some information that you can use to estimate how hot the junction inside the IC will get.

Let's look at an example. Here's a page from the IRF7739 DirectFET datasheet. I like this datasheet because it has almost all the thermal stuff on one page,...


Which MOSFET topology?

Jason Sachs September 1, 20119 comments

A recent electronics.StackExchange question brings up a good topic for discussion. Let's say you have a power supply and a 2-wire load you want to be able to switch on and off from the power supply using a MOSFET. How do you choose which circuit topology to choose? You basically have four options, shown below:

From left to right, these are:

High-side switch, N-channel MOSFET High-side switch, P-channel MOSFET Low-side switch, N-channel...

Modeling Gate Drive Diodes

Jason Sachs March 11, 20241 comment

This is a short article about how to analyze the diode in some gate drive circuits when figuring out turn-off characteristics --- specifically, determining the relationship between gate drive current and gate voltage during turn-off of a power transistor.


Turn It On Again: Modeling Power MOSFET Turn-On Dependence on Source Inductance

Jason Sachs April 29, 2024

This is a short article explaining how to analyze part of the behavior of a power MOSFET during turn-on, and how it is influenced by the parasitic inductance at the source terminal. The brief qualitative reason that source inductance is undesirable is that it uses up voltage when current starts increasing during turn-on (remember, V = L dI/dt), voltage that would otherwise be available to turn the transistor on faster. But I want to show a quantitative approximation to understand the impact of additional source inductance, and I want to compare it to the effects of extra inductance at the gate or drain.


What is Pulse Width Modulation and How Does It Work?

Lance Harvie November 2, 2023

Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) is a technique used to control the average voltage supplied to a device or component by adjusting the width of a series of pulses. It works by rapidly turning a signal on and off at a specific frequency. The crucial element of PWM is the duty cycle, which represents the percentage of time the signal is “on” (high voltage) compared to the total time of one cycle.