Power Supply for Down-hole Instrumentation and Actuators

Abstract

To create the ultimate wireless instrumentation unit for down-hole applications high temperature electronics with very high reliability is needed. It is possible to use ordinary bulk-CMOS devices at temperature up to 175 ⁰C, but the lifetime at these temperatures is to low for a down-hole instrumentation unit. An alternative is to use s Silicon on Insulator process under the fabrication of the semiconductors. The SOI process is a fabrication process where there is buried a oxide layer in the silicon wafer, and thus allowing higher breakdown voltage and/or lower current leakage. The low current leakage allows the semiconductors to be used at higher junction temperature. SOI devices that are commercial available off-the-shelf as a expected lifetime for at least 5 years at 225 ⁰C and thus much lower at junction temperatures below 200 ⁰C. The SOI technology can then be used together with hybrid circuits using ceramic substrate as a replacement for organic PCB and thick-film technology for the passive devices. A package like this gives a system with high reliability both toward high temperature operation and lifetime. The main limitation in the high temperature design is the availability off the larger capacitors; the limitation for high temperature stacked capacitors is 200 ⁰C. The converters designed are the standard step-up and step-down switch-mode power supplies. The converters are designed with current mode control; current mode control is used because of the advantage that comes with it. One off the advantages is the possibility to limit the inductor current; another advantage is the possibility to use constant current charging for the battery. When designing the SOI devices for high temperature operation it is difficult to achieve high enough breakdown voltage. With this in mind, the high temperature converter is designed with series coupled transistors to achieve high enough breakdown voltage for high voltage operation. The transistors have always some small perturbations in their specifications, this has to be considered when connecting transistors in series. This perturbations in for example turn-off speed makes an uneven voltage sharing; this is solved by connecting suitable capacitors in parallel with the switches to maintain an even voltage sharing.