Digital Isolation Technology: Bringing Security and Data Integrity Throughout

【Introduction】In today’s increasingly electrified and digitalized world, it is more important than ever to protect people, valuable assets and critical data from high voltage and other disturbances. Digital isolation technology can solve this challenge. With the rapid upgrade of factory automation, electric vehicles, and advanced digital medical devices, trusted security and data integrity are critical.

With the increasing use of high-performance and sensitive Electronic systems, digital isolation must be considered in every design. Digital isolation technology provides an electrical barrier that protects data from damaging electromagnetic interference (EMI) and creates a safe boundary between high voltages and people, equipment and data. Many applications require this isolation technology, including medical equipment, electric vehicles, and industrial equipment. This isolation boundary allows engineers to design with confidence that the application will meet functional and safety goals.

Digital isolation technology is an essential element that must be included in every design.

Digital isolation technology provides an electrical barrier that protects data from damaging electromagnetic interference and creates a safe boundary between high voltages and people, assets and digital.

From medical devices to vital signs monitoring to defibrillation equipment, digital health technology is developing exponentially. With this development, measurements have become more precise, and digital isolation techniques have also been required to protect these measurements and the people who make them from high voltages and electromagnetic interference. Properly transmitting these measurements without being affected by high voltages and electromagnetic interference maintains a higher integrity of the data. Higher-quality data can lead to more accurate diagnoses, better insights, and ultimately better treatment outcomes.

Digital isolation technology provides high immunity to RF interference, ensuring that these critical medical data used in medical systems accurately reflect patient health.

Electro-medical equipment is susceptible to electrostatic discharge (ESD), making the equipment unreliable and in some cases unsafe. 1

The technology plays an important role in ensuring that medical data provides doctors with accurate insights. It helps physicians “do no harm in the first place” and allows technicians to safely operate high-voltage diagnostic systems.

In the future, gigabit isolation will enable higher image quality and faster test times. It will provide patients with less invasive testing and more flexible testing site/system design options, leading to higher quality diagnoses.

Modern factories have been transformed through digital transformation, leveraging accurate plant-wide data to drive better-informed decisions, increasing automation, flexibility and customization to meet new demands. Manufacturers need a complete picture of the health of these expensive production lines. To ensure stable, reliable, and long operating life, the integrity of machine health data used to plan outages and implement predictive maintenance is critical. This business-critical data must arrive at its destination intact. Digital isolation technology is a key component of these types of systems, providing excellent noise immunity and ensuring reliable and stable data communication, resulting in accurate, reliable system operation and long run times.

Advanced gigabit isolation enables faster distribution of larger batches of data between the analog front end and processing nodes, enhancing interference immunity in harsh industrial environments.

In addition, digital isolation technology can ensure the safety of personnel in these industrial environments. Technological advances allow robots and cobots to work alongside people on factory floors, but many of these machines require advanced isolation techniques to keep those around them safe. These devices employ very advanced sensing solutions to reliably send and receive data, so the robot/cobot moves in a predictable manner, keeping surrounding workers highly safe.

As the world becomes more reliant on electrification, the deployment of renewable energy sources such as wind and solar power is accelerating, and innovations continue to improve performance. These renewable energy sources continue to merge with newly introduced energy storage and battery technologies, eliminating the day/night variations or the sporadic challenges faced by solar and wind power. With the increasing power density of inverters used in solar photovoltaics and the need for energy storage balancing, this generation of solar power requires intensive monitoring of all elements of such systems. Isolation technology provides a safe, reliable and durable solution for communication interfaces and power conversion control.

Embedding isolation technology into gate driver technology, driven by novel wide-bandgap materials, including silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), is a key building block for power conversion in renewable energy applications and related battery energy storage applications. To harness these intermittent sources of energy to power our homes, and to charge electric vehicles faster, while extending the time between charges, battery energy storage technology is key.

The basic form of digital isolation technology protects our personal safety when we use electric vehicles, making us happy to reduce harmful gas emissions, while ensuring that we can safely drive electric vehicles and charge them.

Today, more than ever, our electrified and automated digital future requires higher levels of security and data integrity to protect the increasingly complex and sensitive electronics at its core. Digital isolation technology protects people and assets from high voltages and protects critical data from damaging electronic interference.

¹ Mehdi Kohani and Michael Pecht. Medical Device Failures Induced by Static Electricity: A Big Data Analysis of 10 Years of FDA Reports. Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, March 9, 2018.

² Richard Strube. Electrostatic discharge (ESD) challenges in the electronics industry. Universal Instruments, July 6, 2015.

³ Erik Johnson. An introduction to electric vehicle battery systems. All About Circuits, July 31, 2019

When you design your next breakthrough project, turn to Analog Devices, the inventor and undisputed leader of the digital isolator, for innovative solutions. Let us focus on digital isolation, while you can focus on creating a sustainable future.