Tiny Rectifiers Help OEMs Meet Consumer Demands for Ever-Smaller Wearables
By Shane Timmons, Discrete Product Marketing Manager
The electronics industry always has an eye on the next big thing that will drive consumer demand. Right now, one of the markets that is delivering impressive growth is wearables – including smart watches, earbuds, and smart glasses. Analyst IDC predicts that device shipments in 2024 will be 10.5% up on the figures of 2023, and that nearly 650 million wearable products will ship in 2028[1].
Like many consumer products, one of the key selling points of wearables is their compact size. Make your device smaller than your competitors, and you will have the competitive edge.
Keeping your design small also gives you the option of increasing battery size and hence boosting the time between charges, without adding overall bulk. Even better, if you can manage to improve power efficiency at the same time, you can improve battery life while keeping your product as compact and lightweight as possible.
For design engineers, this means they need to examine every area of their wearables product and to find every possible improvement in component size. Every saving is valuable, even if it is only a square millimeter here or there.
To help meet this demand for ever-smaller components, Diodes Incorporated (Diodes) has launched a family of ultra-compact Schottky rectifiers in tiny chip scale packages (CSPs): SDT2U30CP3 (30V/2A), SDT2U40CP3 (40V/2A), and SDT2U60CP3 (60V/2A). They can be used as blocking or reverse-polarity protection diodes, boost diodes, and switching diodes.
The trio are the industry’s first Schottky rectifiers that can handle 2A in a tiny DSN1406 package, which has a footprint of only 0.84mm2 and an off-board profile of 0.25mm (typical).
How does this compare to competitive products?
The difference is substantial: as the smallest in their class, the rectifiers take up just 3.4% of the PCB area of alternatives in an SMB package.
CSP is a mature package process at Diodes, with products available on the market for over 10 years. Constant development and refinement has brought incremental improvements. The advanced trench technology applied, for instance, enables Diodes to deliver the tiny size and high performance of these latest rectifiers. They are fully RoHS 3.0 compliant and totally lead-free, which are important factors for environmentally responsible designs.
The small size means they can provide the industry’s highest current density of 238 A/cm2, enabling designers to improve the power density of their products. Competitive devices in larger packages typically achieve current densities between 9 and 32 A/cm2.
The rectifiers have excellent avalanche capability, which means they are robust enough to deal with transient voltages, thus improving system stability. They have ultra-low forward voltage performance, which minimizes power losses.
As well as saving valuable space, the tiny size of the rectifiers also means that they have shortened thermal paths. This improves heat dissipation, with a low thermal resistance RθJC 7°C/W which results in lower thermal bill of material costs and increased reliability.
As efficient, reliable power components in a tiny package, the SDT2UxxCP3 rectifiers can help system designers save invaluable PCB real estate in wearables and other portable consumer products – and therefore improve their competitiveness in a growing market.
[1] https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS51975524
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