Superior Digital Isolators with Highest Radiation Performance for Satellites Roaming in Lower Earth Orbit by Renesas Electronics

The leading supplier of semiconductor solutions, Renesas Electronics Corporation, yesterday launched two plastic packaged digital isolators with radiation tolerance that promise highest isolation protection from high voltage fluctuations in serial communications and power supply stages. Most of these interfaces are used in Low Earth Orbits (LEO) SmallSats (Small Satellites).

Fig. 1: Image Showing Rad-Tolerant ISL71610M and ISL71710M Digital Isolators for Small Sized Satellites in Low Earth Orbit

The private “New Space” firms have plans to launch hundreds and thousands of SmallSats across an array of LEO planes to form small constellations. These SmallSat mega-constellations offer ubiquitous broadband IoT (Internet of Things) communications all over the planet and several other important tasks including land, air, and sea asset tracking, high resolution imaging and so forth.

The passive input ISL71610M and active input ISL71710M come with assurance for superior performance for multitude of electrical specifications like common mode transient immunity, data rate, isolation voltage, quiescent current, dynamic current, and propagation delay.

The Giant Magneto Resistive (GMR) digital isolators from Renesas serve as perfect replicants for octocouplers vulnerable to cloudy optics from TID (Total Ionizing Dose) radiations. Both these products will surely out-perform their traditional counterparts that experience EMI (Electromagnetic Interference) because of radiation emissions from dipole and edge radiations.

These isolators have been through characterization tests at a TID (Total Ionizing Doze) of upto 30krads as well as for SEE (Single Event Effects) at a LET (Linear Energy Transfer) of 43MeV.cm²/mg.

Key Features

● SEE characterization: No SEB/SEL, V_DD = 7V; LET = 43MeV.cm²/mg.

● Radiation Characterization that can be observed at LDR of 30krad (Si).

● Quiescent current of 1.3mA (ISL71610M) as well as 1.8mA (ISL71710M).

● Propagation delay equals 8ns and 1ns for ISL71610M and ISL71710M respectively.

● Data rates as high as 100Mbps and 150 Mbps for ISL71610M and ISL71710M respectively.

● Supply range going from 3V – 5.5V.