IPC Quadra test drive

The tantratron team (www.tantratron.tk) offers an IPC Quadra board that provides 4 isloated MOSFET channels. We assemble the board, attach an Arduino Duemilanove / WIZNet combo to generate a PWM signal and solder a IXFB132N50P3 MOSFET to the first channel.

We measure with channel one the generated PWM signal and with channel two the MOSFET gate signal (no load attached to the MOSFET).

In all three tested cases (100kHz, 200kHz, 300kHz) the gate signal is rather useless. The MOSFET driver MCP1403 is obviously unable to drive enough gate current through the default 10R MOSFET gate resistor to charge the gate capacitance of the used pucks.

We therefore solder 1R2 as R4' (parallel to the default 10R) onto the board to reduce the ON gate resistance. The signals look much better now.

The 1R2 resistor, the MOSFET driver and even the MOSFET get hot though if driven at 300kHz, so active cooling might be required at frequencies that high.

However, it turned out that the IPC quadra can drive even pucks like the IXFB132N50P3 with huge gate capacitance reliably at frequencies up to 100kHz (after reducing the ON gate resistance). A H-Bridge configuration with 4 of these power MOSFETs worked fairly well.