Improve Speed of photovoltaic based Solid State Relay

Thread Starter

Electro nS

Joined Feb 20, 2016
8
I am in the process of creating a High power Mosfet based SSR. The idea is using a photovoltaic MOSFET driver such as VO1263 (SIlabs have similar IC but it uses CMOS coupling to create the isolated power). However these type of ICs are pretty slow since they provide about 10uA of drive current at approximately 10v.

During my research on the subject I have found only one circuit without any explanation that should serve to increase the switching speed (without using external DC/DC converter). Shown in the figure below:

enter image description here

I am not quite sure that I understand the circuit completely and I would like your help in sizing some of the components. off-course this circuit is supposed to work in high side configuration that means Vcc (1-60v DC) is supplied at pin4 and load at pin3.

My logic:

  1. D4,R6 (around 1k ?) work as charging path for the bootstrap diode C1. T1,T2 (normal BJT such as BC537- BC527)are normal push-pull driver they work at turn on Only to provide high current to charge the mosfet gate (Sourced by C1).
  2. Z1 and R7(around 100 ohm ?) are used to protect the gate ( however I think they must be reversed order or there should be zener diode across C1 to keep voltage < Vgs max.
  3. R4 and R5 are pull downs (they should in 1MegaOhm range)?? however they cause power loss as R4 is voltage divider with the VO1263 output impedance. (in simulation VO1263 is modeled as voltage source with Series Impedance of 500k) .
  4. D3 and D5 work to keep the mosfet ON after initially being turned on by bootstrap C1 (which will lose its charge if the relay is kept on for sometime).
  5. The PV mosfet driver is not providing enough current for BJTs , So I tried using Darlington instead . The circuit worked after using 2 diodes instead of D5 and 2 diodes instead of D3 (4 diodes in total) donot fully understand why ?
Is my analysis correct ? any suggestion on the resistor value range ? any comments on the circuit is welcomed since I have not found any white paper , appnote or a development board that does something similar to get me started.
 

shortbus

Joined Sep 30, 2009
10,045
While not for the part your using these are for that type of device, they all came from the same origin. I have more if you want them.
 

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Thread Starter

Electro nS

Joined Feb 20, 2016
8
So what switching speed do you want?
without any external components , the photovoltaic array will turn on the mosfet in around 1ms , i am looking into lowering that to 100us . the switching speed will be <500Hz
the opto isolator speed is not the issue here , the issue is the amount of current available to charge the mosfet gate.
 

du00000001

Joined Nov 10, 2020
117
without any external components , the photovoltaic array will turn on the mosfet in around 1ms , i am looking into lowering that to 100us . the switching speed will be <500Hz
the opto isolator speed is not the issue here , the issue is the amount of current available to charge the mosfet gate.
The fastest PV couplers I ever had (to be precise: a PhotoMOS relay driven from said PV cell stack) turned on on 700 us and off in 300 us. That's the best I ever saw. PV cells are rather slow, so you might have to resort to another solution e.g. an isolated gate driver.
 
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