High powered audio amplifiers must always address the problem of power device reliability. In particular, load fault conditions can easily destroy an amplifier that is not carefully designed. Rockford Fosgate has answered this problem with the development of Real Time Power Pro- tection (RTPP).
The RTPP circuits protect the Punch amplifiers by multi- plying output device voltage and current values to obtain approximate instantaneous device power. This instanta- neous power calculation is then processed through a time constant closely modeling the device heating time. If the resulting modeled junction temperature exceeds a set threshold, gate drive to the output devices is limited.
To get a better understanding of the Punch let’s take a closer look.
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