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An Engineer's Guide to High Reliability Components 16 PA99 Power Operational Amplifiers • Ultra-high 2500V power op-amps designed for output currents up to 50mA. • Include cascode input circuit configuration that assures high accuracy. • Flexibility allows customers to tailor slew rate and bandwidth performance. LEARN MORE Apex's Solutions With over 40 years of experience in designing analog power electronics, Apex Microtechnology has developed several techniques for ensuring high reliability, even at high power. One technology that Apex is turning to is silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs. Owing to its material properties and architecture, SiC—a wide-bandgap semiconductor— offers much smaller parasitics and a higher breakdown voltage than traditional silicon power FETs. Moreover, SiC offers better thermal performance than traditional A Quick Note: Cost Considerations Cost is another reason why simultaneously achieving high power and high reliability is difficult. Materials, technologies, and techniques to achieve higher reliability will always be available, even at higher power, but how much is an engineer willing to spend? In many cases, the design budget is limited by many factors outside of the designer's control, and tradeoffs must be made to ensure products will be profitable. Ultimately, financial considerations can be a limitation in achieving high reliability. silicon, meaning less heat is generated during operation. Overall, a transition to SiC technology has allowed Apex to design high-power power electronics with high reliability for its customers. Another way that Apex ensures high reliability at high power is through rigid device packaging techniques. These techniques include the use of thick base plates made from thermally conductive materials and pressure-sintered die attaches that ensures minimal voiding and thus greater thermal conductivity between the substrate and base plates. Through both techniques, Apex designs its integrated circuits to sink heat away from the components, thereby lengthening device lifetimes and ensuring proper operation, even at high power and high temperature. Working directly with its customers, Apex provides guidance on the proper ways to use their devices. Apex's experts can provide design engineers with the appropriate methods for device layout, mounting, and heat-sink selection to maximize the thermal performance of the devices. In these ways and many more, Apex ensures its customers can balance the tradeoffs between high power and high reliability. High Power, High Reliability, No Sacrifices In the design of high-power analog electronics, the need for high reliability is of utmost importance. Unfortunately, technological and economic limitations make simultaneously achieving both high power and high reliability very difficult. Apex Microtechnology is aware of this problem and is addressing it on many fronts. With a long history of innovation in the power electronics field, Apex can offer its customers a set of solutions to help navigate these tradeoffs so that no sacrifices must be made.