the charging stations, requires careful coordination of the necessary components. With its comprehensive range of products from a huge variety of suppliers specialising in power electronics and sensors, Angst+Pfister Sensors and Power (formerly Pewatron) offers a wide selection for this purpose. With BeFAST the Swiss company is introducing a new evaluation board for developers, which will allow for quicker determination of the properties of SiC FET circuit breakers and thus lead to significantly reduced costs.

The main benefit that BeFAST offers developers is that it can test and characterise the high requirements with regard to aspects such as speed, isolation, pulse strength and efficiency in direct interaction. They don’t need to develop their own prototype to assess the usefulness of individual components in their application. BeFAST supports the double pulse testing (DPT) process and the SiC FET are tested in a setup with significantly reduced external influences.

This could ultimately lead to a time to market benefit of at least 4 weeks.

BeFAST is based on an extremely fast SiC cascode switch from United Silicon’s UF3SC series with the lowest RDSon on state resistance available to date at less than 9°mOhm at 1200°volts.

The low resistance leads to lower heat losses and thus enables smaller design. The Murata provides DC-DC converter integrated in the circuit board combined with a digital isolator from NVE provides a very high pulse strength (CMTI) of over 150°V/ns and an isolation of over 5.2°kV. As an option, the circuit can be extended with sensor components for temperature and current measurement. In a currently ongoing process, BeFAST is being prepared for the next generation of Sic FET circuit breakers.

The evaluation kit is delivered with detailed documentation such as the precise parts list, design files (layout and Gerber), applications notes, etc. The Angst+Pfister engineering teams works in close cooperation with suppliers to guarantee the compatibility of the individual products and is available for any support questions you may have.