Impulse transformer based secondary-side self-powered gate-driver for wide-range PWM operation of SiC power MOSFETs

Garcia, Jorge; Gurpinar, Emre; Castellazzi, Alberto

Abstract

This work proposes a solution for an isolated gate driver for SiC MOSFETs, based on a magnetic transformer that simultaneously provides to the secondary side the turn-on and turn-off gate signals and the power required for an adequate gate control. This avoids the use of a dedicated DC-DC isolated converter and optocoupler. The original pulse signal is converted into impulses, avoiding transformer saturation at any duty ratio operation. The small size of the resulting transformer enables an overall size reduction vs. conventional solutions (based either in magnetic or optocoupler + power supply). This enables much more compact designs, which are critical in high-power density applications and multilevel converters. After describing the basic operation of the driver, experimental results on a 2kW prototype demonstrate the feasibility of the proposal. It is worth mentioning that this design is also suitable for GaN devices with minor design changes

Citation

Garcia, J., Gurpinar, E., & Castellazzi, A. Impulse transformer based secondary-side self-powered gate-driver for wide-range PWM operation of SiC power MOSFETs. Presented at 4th IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications (WiPDA 2016)

• Conference Name: 4th IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications (WiPDA 2016)
• End Date: Nov 9, 2016
• Acceptance Date: Sep 12, 2016
• Publication Date: Nov 8, 2016
• Deposit Date: Mar 24, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 24, 2017
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Keywords: Power electronics, Wide band-gap devices, gate drivers
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/829629
• Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7799910/
• Related Public URLs: http://www.wipda2016.org/
• Additional Information: © 2016 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.
• Contract Date: Mar 24, 2017