Manufacturers in all industries constantly push cutting-edge performance while trying to balance such innovation against tried-and-true robust solutions. Designers are faced with the difficult task of balancing design complexity, reliability, and cost. One subsystem in particular, electronics protection, rebuffs moves to innovate due to its nature. These systems protect sensitive and expensive downstream electronic devices (FPGAs, ASICs, and microprocessors), requiring a zero-failure rate.
Many traditional and historically proven protection methodologies—e.g., diodes, fuses, and TVS devices—retain their go-to status, though these are often inefficient, bulky, and require maintenance. To address these deficiencies, active, intelligent protection ICs have proven they can match the protection requirements of traditional methods, but in many ways they’re more robust. Because of the wide range of devices available, the most difficult problem for the designer is simply choosing appropriate solutions. To help designers narrow their choices, this article compares traditional protection methods.