High voltage transient protection for automotive

Sammanfattning: Electronics for automotive needs to be able to handle different situations that can occur on the power line, such as high voltage transients. ISO16750 and ISO-7637 describes different pulses and tests a system needs to be able to handle. This report compares three different protection circuits that can output +5V and +12V built for low power devices. The circuits use different techniques for protection, one that uses TVS diodes, another that uses a voltage regulator IC with built in protection. The last protection uses P-channel MOSFET’s for protection. The circuits are compared against protection, price and leakage current. The most relevant transients to test a system against are decided to be pulse1, pulse 2a and load dump. A pulse generator consisting of a pulse shaping network and a common drain amplifier is used to create the test pulses. The result shows that all the circuits could protect against pulse 2a and load dump. However, all the circuits did fail against pulse 1 due to an undersized diode for negative voltage protection. The leakage current did not exceed 4µA for two of the circuits in the temperature interval of -40°C to +100°C. All the circuits started to have high leakage current when the temperature got up to +150°C. The price for the circuits didn’t differ that much, all the circuits cost below 3 US-dollar per circuit when making 10 000 circuits. The conclusions that could be made of the results are that all the circuits could protect against pulse 1, pulse 2a and load dump if correct diode is used for negative voltage protection. The protection that builds on Pchannel MOSFET’s should be the best choice for low power devices due to its low leakage current and potential for low cost. The disadvantage is the complexity and number of components needed for the circuit. The TVS diodes should be used if low complexity and low number of components is preferred. The disadvantage is that TVS diodes gets hot if a load dump is applied and the interval between stand-off voltage and maximum clamping voltage is quite high. The study also shows that there are cheaper solutions than using TVS diodes.