Power converter enables SMPS with 5V output voltage

Suited for low-power applications in home appliances, building, lighting and motion control, as well as small industrial and consumer applications, the VIPER01 operates directly from a rectified mains supply and integrates an 800V avalanche-rugged Power MOSFET with PWM current-mode control and multiple protection circuits.

The new device belongs to the VIPerPlus family of high-voltage converters, now in its second generation, and exploits ST’s proprietary BCD (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) technology. BCD allows the integration in a single chip of a high-performance PWM controller with a high-voltage logic-level control transistor, protection and diagnostic circuitry, without significantly impacting the robustness and reliability of the power transistor.

The VIPER01 enables designers to meet the most stringent energy-saving standards (including the US Energy Star and the European EuP Lot 6 tier 2 from EC Ecodesign Directive), as it has very low power consumption and switches automatically to pulse frequency modulation under light load conditions. It can be used in fly-back, buck, and buck-boost converter topologies, while the integrated high-voltage start-up, sense-FET, error amplifier and oscillator with jitter allow a complete application to be designed with the minimum number of external components.

The VIPER01 comes with a set of tools including evaluation kits, application notes and spice models to jumpstart more robust, safer and cost-effective SMPS designs.

VIPER01 is available now in volume, priced at $0.364 each in 1,000 unit quantities.