Why Haven't You Applied for RoadTest: Gate Driver EVM with Truly Differential Inputs?

I blatantly ignore all T&C - except for the requirement to post the report / blog.

So, could you take my poll and give me an idea why this roadtest is not enticing you to apply?

The reason I avoided Design Challenges and RoadTests when I first came to the site was that I didn't agree to the terms and conditions.

2.2.6 Grants the Organiser the right to use his or her likeness,...without restriction for the purposes of Contest or the promotion of it or the Site;

2.2.7 Agrees to participate positively in all publicity surrounding the Contest;

2.4 No Application may contain any of the hazardous substances identified by Article 4 of Directive 2002/95/EC of the European Parliament on the Restrictions on the Use of Substances in Electronic and Electrical Equipment ("the Directive") or the use of such hazardous substances in the in any such Project must not exceed the maximum concentration values set out in the Directive.

3.4 Winners agree to take part in all publicity which the Organiser or the Sponsor wishes to use to promote the RoadTest, the Products featured or other Contests with which the Organiser may be connected from time to time.

The publicity ones are too open-ended and weighted too heavily in favour of element14. The RoHS one doesn't allow for tin/lead solder.

kas.lewis

This component is not suitable for a high voltage diff probe. In fact, its input is meant to be low-voltage from a device like a microcontroller. The output is like a digital signal, on or off. Take a look at its block diagram. There is a Schmitt trigger in the output stage.

The differential input is a way to isolate the switch transistor's gate from the microcontroller. As others (and the datasheet points out), the differential input helps to minimize ground bounce when the FET is driving high inductive loads.

baldengineer,

I may have misunderstood some of what you have explained above but I thought I'd try learn something new so here goes.....

Could you use the differential gate driver as input for a high voltage differential probe or will the gate driver only produce on/off states. If it could produce proportional outputs (attenuation of the signal with a specific value) then an interesting project might be to see if you could create a high voltage differential probe with this.

Thanks in advance

Kas

Thanks for your response. Regarding private beta testing, I received the kit and I sent you the report of my findings. During Ultra96 roadtest, I received two mails from you, one for selection as roadtester, in your second mail you had decided to select my roadtest application for project build and not for roadtest review. After that I didn't hear from you. The second roadtest for which I did not receive hardware was for Panasonic grid-eye.

Regards,

Nitin

Nitin,

I apologize if I have not been prompt in responding. I went back into my email and tried to determine what our correspondence was. I have a number of emails regarding private beta testing, which you were selected for that. You did receive the kit, right? As far as the Ultra96 roadtest, when I select the candidates, they have a day to respond. If I don't hear back, I usually begin selecting someone else and wait another day. If I get no response, I go with my alternate. I also check to see if someone is currently on a roadtest; I usually will wait till the person has posted the review before I select him again. In any event, I should be responding promptly to you. Thanks for mentioning it. I'll have to make sure I am responding more promptly.

Sincerely,

Randall Scasny

RoadTest Program Manager

I’m participating in the Arm Education Roadtest and I also have another application pending.  I try not to put too much in the pipeline because I want to be sure that I have enough time to complete anything I apply for.

I would say that I have no need for it at the moment. For something like this, I'd like to have reviews from people who are knowledgeable in the field and can provide constructive feedback and comparisons to existing products.

-Dan

For me couple of times it so happened that I didn't receive hardware after getting selected for roadtest. Last time it happened with Avnet Xilinx 96board. rscasny sent a mail to intimate about roadtest/project build but, nothing happened after that. I didn't even get a reply to my follow-up mails. I know that I cannot expect reply every time but I take significant amount of time and effort in coming up with my roadtest applications and when something like this happens, I feel like not investing my time.

-Nitin

Dear rscasny,

A bit late to the thread but I will probably echo some of the sentiments in the thread -

• The product itself is a component, so that would probably only appeal to those involved in designing something relevant to the component.
• Familiarity with designing a converter is almost a necessity, along with access to suitable test equipment (power supply, oscilloscope) in order to either validate the claims or demonstrate benefits. Even more thought would be required to make it interesting.
• The evaluation board itself is interesting in its design, although the major benefits (ground-bounce mitigation through differential drive signals) isn't something which is necessarily easy to simulate and test in an appropriate way. A bit of thought needs to go into understanding when ground bounce would occur, what mitigations are available, what the negative impacts are and their magnitude, then understanding how the differential triggering gets around this. The more interesting thing is to see how much the differential inputs can tolerate (e.g. CMRR, swings above/below power rails) ...
• The time required to develop a test protocol, develop the necessary test waveforms, properly run the testing and report on it is probably not too attractive to the majority of members - especially as most evaluation boards are not useful for many other purposes after the fact.
• Of course, the item does come with a datasheet - designers are inclined to trust this, build their own designs and evaluate it in their own applications rather than on an artificial "simulation" that is the development board as that is what really matters in the end - how does it perform in your own design.

That being said, I personally haven't applied to the RoadTest yet because I lack experience in power converter/MOSFET driver design so I would assume (naturally) that someone else would probably be able to do a much better job than I could. While I do have the test equipment necessary (to my knowledge) to give it a try, my expectation is that RoadTesters should be relatively experienced in the area of the product that they RoadTest (otherwise, their opinions would not hold water). However, seeing as you are finding difficulty in attracting RoadTest candidates, I am seriously reconsidering whether I should throw my hat into the ring and try it anyway (as I did with the Molex Antennas RoadTest where I had a number of reservations) and see what the results are (even though I don't quite have full visibility as to the fine details of my intended test protocol). I suppose it could be a learning experience ... although I'm not sure that Infineon had that in mind as the aim of handing out evaluation boards.

- Gough