Design of an Advanced Programmable Current-Source Gate Driver for Dynamic Control of SiC Devices

Wang, X; Wu, H; Pickert, V

doi:10.1109/APEC.2019.8721941

Design of an Advanced Programmable Current-Source Gate Driver for Dynamic Control of SiC Devices

Lookup NU author(s): Dr Xiang Wang, Dr Haimeng Wu, Professor Volker Pickert

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This is the authors' accepted manuscript of a conference proceedings (inc. abstract) that has been published in its final definitive form by IEEE, 2019.

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Abstract

Silicon carbide (SiC) power devices outperform Silicon-based devices in operational voltage levels, power densities, operational temperatures and switching frequencies. However, the gate oxide of the SiC-based device is more fragile compared with its Si counterpart. The vulnerability of the gate oxide in SiC power devices requires the development of a gate driver that is able to have more control during the turn-on and turn-off process. This paper proposes an innovative current-source gate driver where the gate current can be fully programmed. The novelty of the gate driver is that the dynamic switching transients and the static on/off-state can be controlled independently. In order to achieve this approach, a signal decomposition and reconstruction technique is proposed to apply the separate control over the dynamic switching transient and the static on/off-state gate voltage respectively. The fundamental principle of the proposed circuit is verified in simulation. In addition, a prototype of the active gate driver has been built and tested to validate the effectiveness of the flexible control over the gate voltage.