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I had previously shown how to drive N-channel MOSFETs in low-side configuration. You can find the tutorial here: http://electel.blogspot.com/2016/12/low-side-mosfet-drive-circuits-and_23.html I’ve been requested to write a tutorial/article regarding high-side MOSFET drive. So, here I’ll talk about N-channel MOSFET high-side drive. Let’s first look at the common low side configuration.  Fig. 1 - N-channel MOSFET configured as low-side switch Now let’s look at a MOSFET configured as a high-side switch. Fig. 2 - N-channel MOSFET configured as high-side switch You can quite easily see the difference between the high-side configuration and the low-side configuration. In the low-side configuration, the load is connected between the drain and +V, while the source is connected to ground. Thus, the gate drive is referenced to ground. So by applying a voltage of >7V (for Power MOSFETs) or >4V (for Logic Level MOSFETs), the MOSFET can be fully turned on. Now let’s talk about the high-si...

In many situations, we need to use MOSFETs configured as high-side switches. Many a times we need to use MOSFETs configured as high-side and low-side switches. Such as in bridge circuits. In half-bridge circuits, we have 1 high-side MOSFET and 1 low-side MOSFET. In full-bridge circuits we have 2 high-side MOSFETs and 2 low-side MOSFETs. In such situations, there is a need to use high-side drive circuitry alongside low-side drive circuitry. The most common way of driving MOSFETs in such cases is to use high-low side MOSFET drivers. Undoubtedly, the most popular such driver chip is the IR2110. And in this article/tutorial, I will talk about the IR2110. You can download the IR2110 datasheet from the IR website. Here's the download link: www.irf.com/product-info/datasheets/data/ir2110.pdf First let’s take a look at the block diagram and the pin assignments and pin definitions (also called lead assignments and lead definitions): Fig. 1 - IR2110 block diagram (click on image to enlarge)...