What's New
- iriver Lplayer teardown
- Sipura SPA-841 teardown
- Robotic locomotion
- Finding value in work
- ZFS: the final straw
- Cross-blog pimpage: sixproducts.com
- Running AbstractSpoon ToDoList under Wine
- Aoyue 906 Hot Air Rework Station review
- What I learned from setting up ZFS on my fileserver
- Nokia E65 review: how does it stack up against a 5-year-old Siemens ME45?
- Extending battery life on the Dell XPS M1210
- A quick guide to using MySQL in Python
- Market segments and tactility: the new Apple iPhone
- Cree XR-E LEDs
- What's New block for Drupal
- Google calendar for Sydney adventure and MTB races
- Background Check Antivirus
- Multithreading and performance
- DVI on laptops
- Dell XPS M1210 review
- Improving university for developers
- Automatic Wealth for Grads, by Michael Masterson
- Converting Access databases to PHP/MySQL webapps
- Testing the board
- Assembly
- Making a PCB
- Random bits and pieces
- One weekend, one PCB layout
- Commitment
- Accounting software
- More LTSpice rambling
- The things you find...
- Playing catchup
- Market research
- What type of business?
- Introduction
- New look
- Integrating the H-bridge and its controller
- Using CPLDs and FPGAs in hobby electronics
- A simple logic analyzer
- I2C-based H-bridge controller with PWM
- The virtues of small development teams
- Building a Sumo robot (summary)
- High-power LED mountain bike light
- Optimizing your Start menu for fast program access
- The best batteries in the world...
- Battery-powered USB iPod charge cable that requires no special components
- How to build a simple Luxeon LED bike headlight
Why a discrete gate drive circuit?
I've been building various FET applications (including switching power supplies), and I've found that the easiest (and perhaps best-performance) gate drives in this voltage range tend to be the purpose-built gate drive ICs available from various vendors (I've been using the IRF ones, but there's lots of them out there). No extra components (other than bypass caps and maybe a low-value resistor in series with the gate); you can get dual (and quad, as I recall) units, and they're fast and strong. Compared to the lackluster performance of some discrete transistor circuits (especially important with 250KHz switching power supplies, but probably noticeable as heat in slower motor drives), they're a breeze to use. Add to this the programmable dead-time generation available from today's microcontroller PWM units, and you have a winning combination.