Reinforced Galvanic Isolation: Integrated Approaches to Go Beyond 20-kV Surge Voltage (invited)

This paper provides a survey about alternative approaches to implement silicon–integrated galvanic isolators with very high isolation rating (i.e., compliant with the reinforced isolation requirements). Traditional integrated galvanic isolators are based on chip–scale isolation capacitors or transformers, whose performance is limited by the adopted isolation technology (i.e., the dielectric material and its thickness). In this paper, two approaches for data and power transfer are discussed, which exploit the RF coupling between two isolated interfaces, while packaging/assembling techniques are used to guarantee high galvanic isolation.