Protection
The most common form of SOA protection used with bipolar junction transistors senses the collector-emitter current with a low-value series resistor; the voltage across this resistor is applied to a small auxiliary transistor that progressively 'steals' base current from the power device as it passes excess collector current.
This approach is effective but not bullet-proof. In practice it is very difficult to design a protection circuit that will work under all conditions, and it is left up to the design engineer to weigh the likely fault conditions against the complexity and cost of the protection.
Read more about this topic: Safe Operating Area
Famous quotes containing the word protection:
“What is marriage, is marriage protection or religion, is marriage renunciation or abundance, is marriage a stepping-stone or an end. What is marriage.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“If one really wishes to know how justice is administered in a country, one does not question the policemen, the lawyers, the judges, or the protected members of the middle class. One goes to the unprotected—those, precisely, who need the laws’s protection most!—and listens to their testimony.”
—James Baldwin (1924–1987)
“The best protection parents can have against the nightmare of a daycare arrangement where someone might hurt their child is to choose a place that encourages parents to drop in at any time and that facilitates communication among parents using the program. If parents are free to drop in and if they exercise this right, it is not likely that adults in that place are behaving in ways that harm children.”
—Gwen Morgan (20th century)