As product safety standards evolve, such as with the new UL 2595 regulations, anticipating potential issues customers could face and innovating to address those issues, is key to seamless adoption.
Just as products continue to change and adapt to meet our needs, industry standards also evolve to address new technical insights or consumer concerns. Often these changes are initially addressed by one local or regional standards body. But in most cases then they are then incorporated into other regional standards until they become de-facto worldwide. So keeping up-to-date with requirements around the globe and anticipating changes, is crucial to continued success.
Of course when it comes to standards that are focused on the performance and safety of consumer and commercial products, it is not just the OEMs that are interested. At Nexperia we also closely watch for new developments within our domain, because any change can have an impact on our customers. For instance, recent updates to North American based standard UL 2595 General Requirements for Battery-Powered Appliances with a maximum voltage rating of 75 V d.c. could have a significant impact on some Li-ion powered motor designs.
The new UL 2595 regulation requires a clearing distance between drain and source on the driving MOSFETs of 1.5 mm in case of battery shorts, unless there are seperate safety measures in place. Now with older designs using a TO220 package this is not a problem. However over the last few years as technology has improved, smaller more powerful brushless DC motors using Li-ion batteries are becoming the norm. That has meant a significant rise in designs using more compact SO8 packages like our highly efficient LFPAK. Unfortunately, standard SO8 packages do not provide the required drain source clearing space.
Anticipating that this could be an issue for some customers using compact designs, we have developed a LFPAK variant that is complaint with the UL 2595 regulation. While this change has a small performance impact, extensive testing has shown it to be as robust as a standard LFPAK package. This gives customers an additional design option when it comes to meeting the new UL 2595 regulations for battery-powered appliances for the US market and more than likely the rest of the world once the regulations harmonize.
If you would like to get to know more about what MOSFET options are availalbe in the modified LFPAK56-UL2595 variant, why not take a look at our Quick Learning video.