Safe Operating Area - Limits of The Safe Operating Area

Limits of The Safe Operating Area

Where both current and voltage are plotted on logarithmic scales, the borders of the SOA are straight lines:

  1. IC = ICmax — current limit
  2. VCE = VCEmax — voltage limit
  3. IC VCE = Pmax — dissipation limit, thermal breakdown
  4. IC VCEα = const — this is the limit given by the second breakdown (bipolar junction transistors only)

SOA specifications are useful to the design engineer working on power circuits such as amplifiers and power supplies as they allow quick assessment of the limits of device performance, the design of appropriate protection circuitry, or selection of a more capable device. SOA curves are also important in the design of foldback circuits.

Read more about this topic:  Safe Operating Area

Famous quotes containing the words limits of, limits, safe, operating and/or area:

    The limits of prudence: one cannot jump out of a burning building gradually.
    Mason Cooley (b. 1927)

    The element running through entire nature, which we popularly call Fate, is known to us as limitation. Whatever limits us, we call Fate.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The almost unexplored Everglades lay close by and with a half- hour’s start a man who knew the country was safe from pursuit. As one man cheerfully confided ..., ‘A boat don’t leave no trail, stranger.’
    —For the State of Florida, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)

    I think there are innumerable gods. What we on earth call God is a little tribal God who has made an awful mess. Certainly forces operating through human consciousness control events.
    William Burroughs (b. 1914)

    If you meet a sectary, or a hostile partisan, never recognize the dividing lines; but meet on what common ground remains,—if only that the sun shines, and the rain rains for both; the area will widen very fast, and ere you know it the boundary mountains, on which the eye had fastened, have melted into air.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)