Smart home

Over the years, designers in industrial, medical, and other systems have introduced isolation to meet safety regulations or reduce the noise of ground loops. Galvanic isolation ensures that data transmission is not through electrical connections or leakage paths, thereby avoiding safety risks. However, isolation brings limitations in terms of latency, power consumption, cost, and size. The goal of digital isolators is to meet safety requirements while minimizing adverse effects. At present, digital isolators are widely used in smart homes, medical equipment, and other environments with high safety requirements.

 

　　The development of smart home is becoming more and more popular, and began to combine a variety of intelligent and green energy systems to maintain the normal operation of these systems and ensure the safety of operators must rely on an important device-digital isolators. With the isolation solution providing perfect protection at the high and low voltage ends of the system, the performance, flexibility and reliability of the power system can be effectively improved.

 

Compared with the more well-known semiconductor devices such as general microcontrollers (MCU) and wireless protocol chips, which are mainly responsible for the function of the device, the isolator can be said to be a guardian of the system, blocking the risk factors that may damage the entire system. At the same time, users are protected from high voltage damage. Therefore, in the home, more and more common photovoltaic inverters, electric vehicle charging piles, smart meters, water and electricity thermal smart meters, video monitoring systems, and energy storage devices have actually used many different isolators.

 

As energy-saving requirements have become more and more deeply rooted in consumers' minds, it has also driven the new development trend of isolation products and started to shift to higher efficiency, lower cost and smaller size CMOS digital processes to meet the demands of intelligent systems for power saving and reliability .

 

　　The most typical need for an isolator in a smart home system is a photovoltaic inverter. The photovoltaic inverter converts the direct current collected by the photovoltaic panel into alternating current and imports it into the main power network. The working time is expected to exceed 25 years, and the operating environment is harsh. Once the system has any failure, it will affect not only personal or family safety, but even It will have an impact on the entire power network, which shows that the requirements of photovoltaic inverters for safety, reliability and stability are very strict.