OM13007,598: Solar Charger w/ DC Load Out

Solar illumination can be converted into electrical energy through solar cells and the energy generated is called PhotoVoltaic (PV) energy. While the sun as a source is available for free, generating PV energy is expensive. This makes it important to extract the maximum PV energy from the incident sun light using the solar cells.

The MPT612 is an IC developed for Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) applications to extract the maximum power from a source such as a PV panel or fuel cell. The ICs primary function is to track the MPP of the source based on the voltage and current. The resulting Pulse-Width Modulated (PWM) output is sent to the MOSFET to control the device switching, enabling the system to operate at MPP.

Utilizing a patent pending MPPT algorithm defined in the embedded software, the MPT612 provides up to 15 kB of on-chip high-speed flash memory enabling enhanced functionality using user software. Serial communication interfaces such as UART, SPI, SSP and I2C-bus make the MPT612 ideally suited for integrating with real world systems.