DCP’s technological leap to ±1%

DCP’s technological leap to ±1%

We recently had a chat with Heather Babcock, product marketing managing manager at Intersil, to find out more about the award-winning ISL22317 digitally controlled potentiometer (DCP). What was the need, who was involved, any challenges, and were there any suprises were some of the questions asked.

The story

“Since Xicor/Intersil invented the DCP around 1988, the industry-standard resistor tolerance has been >20%. We have seen customers in consumer, medical and industrial markets compensate for this error. If customers wanted a precise variable resistor, they would need to use additional components and/or spend valuable time calibrating the system. We also identified that temperature coefficient matching between devices within an application was critical, especially for the industrial market. The DCP provides a solution to these issues by reducing resistor tolerance to a typical 1%, and by matching a discrete resistor value within 10 ppm/C.”

The team

“The team involved is truly an international team with our design team in India, test, product and reliability engineers in Florida and both applications and marketing in Milpitas. We also had worldwide customer and sales input on the definition, especially in Japan.”

Challenges/suprises

“The largest challenge was that we were limited to the fabrication process. The resistor tolerance of the digital potentiometer is directly related to the process variation used to create the poly silicon resistors. Design needed to find an innovative way to bypass the process limits and make the technological leap to ±1% using the same process. As a result, Intersil developed the current ISL22317 patent-pending architecture enabling us to obtain higher precision.

“We initially expected to have more time to work through this new technological advance. One of our primary customers had a very aggressive schedule which caused the entire International team to accelerate the development under the customer’s time constraint. Considering this was a platform development with innovative patent pending technology, this team worked both efficiently and effectively to release the product in time to meet the customer’s needs.”

Christina Nickolas