Q8

Description

These drivers are now obsolete and are no longer being manufactured. For more details, please contact us.

The Q8 is a multichannel voltage driver designed for controlling thermal phase shifters on a variety of photonic chips, including silicon, silicon nitride, silicon oxynitride, and silica.

It can drive 8 outputs with 16-bit precision hardware voltage control, and emulated current and power control. Up to 1 A is available to each channel, allowing high-powered phase shifters of up to 20 W to be driven without additional electronics. On-board self-calibration circuitry keeps the controlled output voltage absolutely accurate over time and under a variety of load conditions.

We have engineered all conceivable safeguards into the Q8: over-current/over-voltage protection, individually programmable for each output channel; reverse polarity protection; electrostatic discharge (ESD) protection; short-circuit protection; and even protection from misaligning the input connector.

A standardised 2×24 pin 0.1-inch header is provided for connecting the driver’s analogue and digital signals. This connector conveniently mates with our range of docks. Pins are fully gold coated for superior electrical contact and corrosion resistance.

Multiple Q8 units can be connected together in a daisy chain configuration, sharing a single power source, connector, and communications port. Connected in this way, the computer simply sees a larger number of available output channels, and can control them with the same intuitive command set. You can scale the number of controllable degrees of freedom in your application by simply adding drivers to the chain.

Output circuit diagram

Referring to the diagram, below, nominal performance values are as follows. Values with ‘±’ are digitisation step sizes (i.e. resolution) and also target accuracy.

• a = 0..20 V ± 310 μV @ +15 mA max

• d = 0..+100 mA ± 24 μA

Multiple Q8 units can be connected together in a daisy chain configuration, sharing a single power source, connector, and communications port. Connected in this way, the computer simply sees a larger number of available output channels, and can control them with the same intuitive command set. You can scale the number of controllable degrees of freedom in your application by simply adding drivers to the chain.

Additional information

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