India, August 23, 2016 – STMicroelectronics has introduced a high-voltage power converter that allows designers to build an ultra-low-consumption, simple, and cost-effective SMPS (switched-mode power supply) with a 5V output voltage. Particularly suited for low-power applications in home appliances, building, lighting, and motion control, as well as small industrial and consumer applications, the VIPER01 operates directly from a rectified mains supply and integrates an 800V avalanche-rugged Power MOSFET with PWM (pulse-width modulation) current-mode control and multiple protection circuits. The converter is tailored to provide the auxiliary supply to microcontrollers in IoT devices that are permanently connected to the Internet or a local network.

The new device belongs to the VIPerPlusTM family of high-voltage converters, now in its second generation, and exploits ST’s proprietary BCD (Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS) technology. BCD allows the integration in a single chip of a high-performance PWM controller with a high-voltage logic-level control transistor, protection and diagnostic circuitry, without significantly impacting the robustness and reliability of the power transistor.

The VIPER01 enables designers to meet the most stringent energy-saving standards, as it has very low power consumption and switches automatically to pulse frequency modulation under light load conditions. It can be used in fly-back, buck, and buck-boost converter topologies, while the integrated high-voltage start-up, sense-FET, error amplifier, and oscillator with jitter allow a complete application to be designed with the minimum number of external components.