When designing a power supply, complying with safety standards is essential to protect operators and other personnel from electric shock and hazardous energy. This article discusses the digital isolation techniques to address these issues with Analog Devices’ iCoupler ® products in digital power supply design.

These issues limit optocoupler or transformer use in some high reliability, compact size, and long life applications. The transformer solution also has bulk size, magnetic saturation problems, etc.

1 However, the traditional optocoupler solution has low bandwidth and current transfer ratio (CTR), which causes wide variation with temperature and degradation with time problems. The challenge of isolation in a digital power supply is in sending digital or analog signals across the isolation barrier with fast speed, accuracy, and compact size. For these applications, isolation is often required. Digital power supplies are widely employed in high end server, storage, telecom brick module, etc. With the aggressive growth of the internet and communication infrastructure, digital control techniques are becoming more and more popular in the power systems of telecom, networking, and computers because they can offer attractive advantages, including flexibility, component count reduction, advanced, control algorithm, system communication, low sensitivity to external noises, and parameter variation. Isolation in Digital Power Supply-Why and How

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