SLLA646 August 2024 ISO6520 , ISO6521
The last decade has seen an exponential growth in consumption of semiconductors across various applications. This growth is assisted with major technical advancements in semiconductors that have enabled key advantages in system designs.
One of the key trends observed across various industrial applications is shrinking solution size. The advantage of a smaller system design is actually twofold. For one, shrinking solution size enables an increase in system throughput, with the same available board area. This is extremely critical for applications that require higher board density, like in Semiconductor Test and Measurement. Higher test resource counts are instrumental for testing integrated chips used in AI/ML applications with high I/O channel count.
Additionally, the designs get sleeker and more compact, reducing the overall space and cost with no change in system functionality. For instance, increasing power density (power per unit area) in pluggable chargers for faster, smaller, lighter for devices such as phones and laptops is necessary to facilitate the growth in power requirements in portable consumer electronics.
Functional isolation devices being smaller and cost effective can assist this trend in shrinking designs. This white paper introduces the concept of functional isolation in context with basic/reinforced isolation. It also illustrates various applications that make use of isolators that are trending across industry, and how functional isolators can be used to further decrease the solution size and cost.