With 4-V minimum operating voltage, the VNQ9050LAJ 4-channel automotive high-side driver powers through disturbances including cold cranking operation down to 2.7 V. It thus boosts vehicle reliability in extreme conditions and when there’s resilience to severe transients.
Featuring high accuracy and wide operating range, the driver, developed by STMicroelectronics, provides several current-sense diagnostic functions. These include analog feedback of load current, overload and short-to-ground or power-limitation alerts, thermal-shutdown indication, output short-to-VCC detection, and OFF-state open-load detection. The VNQ9050LAJ, designed to power 12-V ground-connected loads, is compatible with 3- and 5-V logic signals and offers a typical on-resistance as low as 50 Ω.
As an intelligent power switch, the driver protects resistive, capacitive, and inductive loads using an integrated high-precision, load-current-sensing, current-mirror circuit. It’s connected to an external pin that allows for connecting a resistor to convert the sensed current into a voltage for continuous load monitoring. A sense-enable pin lets similar devices share the external sense resistor.
The driver also integrates an overvoltage clamp, thermal-transient limiting, and a configurable latch-off/on overtemperature or power limitation. Among other features are electrostatic-discharge protection, loss of ground and loss of VCC protection, and reverse-battery protection.
The VNQ9050LAJ, in production now, is available in a thermally enhanced Power-SSO16 package. Pricing starts at $1.09 for orders of 1,000 pieces.
