This is great discussion. I was doing a bit of research myself (it has
been over 10 years since I did any HW design, so am pretty rusty).

Another option that sounds even better is to use the new chips designed
for exactly this to control DirectFETs. That way the voltage drop and
power waste will be significantly reduced with very little additional
cost. The chips I were looking at were IR5001S:
http://www.irf.com/product-info/data...ta/ir5001s.pdf or LT4351:
http://www.linear.com/pc/productDeta...,C1079,P21 73


I have used DirectFET stuff in robotics and found them to be very
reliable and very simple to design with.

My biggest problem is all these components are only available in
surface mount these days and I have never tried to build a circuit
using them.