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Application Circuit Description
The ACPL-P346/ACPL-W346 is an isolated gate driver that provides 2.5 A output current. The voltage and high peak
output current supplied by this optocoupler make it ideally suited for direct driving of MOSFET with ratings up to 1000
V/100 W. It is also designed to drive different sizes of buffer stage that will make the class of power MOSFET scalable.
ACPL-P346 (and ACPL-W346) provides a single isolation solution suitable for both low and high power ratings of motor
control and inverter applications.
Each of the ACPL-P346/ACPL-W346 evaluation boards, as shown in Figure 5, accommodates two ACPL-P346/ACPL-W346
ICs. Therefore, each board is enough to drive the top and the bottom arms of the half-bridge inverter. It allows the de-
signer to easily test the performance of a gate driver in an actual application under real-life operating conditions. Opera-
tion of the evaluation board requires merely the inclusion of a common 5 V DC isolated Supply1 on the input side and
an isolated DC Supply2 (range from 12 V ~ 20 V) for the bottom arm of the inverter power MOSFET, while the DC supply
needed for the top arm is easily generated through bootstrapping included in the evaluation board.
Note: As can be seen on the board, the isolation circuitry (at the far left) is easily contained within a small area while
maintaining adequate spacing for good voltage isolation and easy assembly.
Figure 5. Top and bottom views of ACPL-P346/W346 evaluation board
