Would this MOSFET be suitable for use with an Arduino?

Question

I'm looking for a MOSFET which can be controlled by an Arduino at 5V, and which can switch power on/off to a Raspberry Pi and peripherals (also 5V) that will peak around 3A of current. It's a battery-powered project, so minimal wasted energy is ideal, and there is no need to rapidly switch the power supply on/off. A cursory search for logic level MOSFETS on AliExpress turned up IRFB3006PBF. Its low Rds(on) of 2.5 mΩ seemed pretty good, and it seemed to tick all the right boxes, with a max Vgs of 4V.

The max Vgs means it would definitely be all the way on at 5V GS voltage, right?

Would this work, or have I missed something important that would make this unsuitable?

• Juraj Lonc: Beware that aliexpress/ebay is flooded with fakes. Some are better some are worse. Anything you buy there is most likely not genuine and very often has different (worse) parameters than original.
• Justin: @nonoitall - I've edited your question to make it less of a shopping question so it can hopefully be reopened. Feel free to revert or edit it yourself if I've changed it too much from your intention.
• Chris Stratton: Keep in mind that you cannot use an NFET to control power to systems that need to share signals with your Arduino (ie, situations where a common ground is required); for that you need to switch the positive rail - ie you would need a PFET to or a complicated circuit to drive an NFET on the high side. Also keep in mind that you must not apply signals to most devices when they are powered down, as signal voltages are typically prohibited from being more than a tiny bit outside the range of supply voltages. Also remember that a pi should never have power removed until after soft shutdown.
• Chris Stratton: Probably you should start by replacing the pi with something that has low power sleep modes; basically something with an SoC originally intended to be a tablet, instead of originally designed to be a set top box with mains power.
• marcelm: "with a max Vgs of 4V." That's not Vgs, that's Vgs(th). And no, it definitely does not guarantee what you want; Vgs(th) defines when the mosfet is no longer "fully off". It says nothing about when the mosfet is "fully on".

Answer 1

The IRFB3006PBF should work fine although it's QUITE an overkill, pretty sure the datasheet you linked is for a different transistor though (that one should work fine too and I think that's the one you meant to ask about). The graphics in the datasheet should help you determine how much current can the the unloaded transistor pass at a given GS voltage, in the case of FQP13N10L that's well over 10A. Hope that helps.

Answer 2

The most instructive information comes from Fig. 1 on page 3 of the Infineon IRFB3006 datasheet:

enter image description here

If we assume that the Arduino's output is a little less than its +5V supply, say +4.5V when high, then the trace that interests you here is the third from the bottom.

This shows typical \$V_{DS}\$ as a function of drain current \$I_D\$. When the transistors is "on", the goal is to obtain as small a \$V_{DS}\$ as possible, while load current is passing. For \$V_{GS}=+4.5V\$, this graph shows that \$V_{DS}=0.1V\$ when load current \$I_D=35A\$. Though the graph doesn't show \$V_{DS}<0.1V\$, you can infer that \$V_{DS}\$ continues to fall (which is good) for \$I_D<35A\$.

This is "typical" behaviour. You might be unlucky, and get a device that performs considerably worse than this, and it would be safer to assume that \$I_D\$ will be closer to 20A when \$V_{DS}=0.1V\$, which is more like the plot for \$V_{GS}=+4V\$.

If your load requires 20A or less, and \$V_{DS(MAX)}=0.1V\$ is acceptable to you, then this MOSFET is fine for your application.