Tuesday, 5 August 2014

PWM-driven MOSFET heats up


I have designed an MCU-based PWM dimmer for LED strips.


My circuit works fine but there is a problem: The MOSFET is unexpectedly hot (i.e. 65°C). So I scoped the drain voltage using an oscilloscope and I saw that the drain voltage was about 0.130V (as expected) when the MOSFET is on, but it is 9V --it should be 16V-- when the MOSFET is off. So I'm not sure but I think that this causes the MOSFET to heat up.


schematic


simulate this circuit – Schematic created using CircuitLab


Where is my fault? How can I solve this problem?



EDIT: Here are the waveform of VDS:


enter image description here


enter image description here



Answer



The 9 volts is a red herring. 0.13 volts across a FET of on-resistance of 0.05 ohms is a power of 340 mW and this will generate heat. The junction to ambient thermal resistance is typically 50 K/W, so without a heat sink and at a local ambient temperature of 30 °C, the temperature will rise to 30 °C + 0.34 W * 50 K/W = 47 °C then factor in that the temperature rise might locally increase ambient another twenty degrees and you are at 67 °C. Not really a problem.


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