A Half-Bridge Gate-Driver for high-efficient Boost Converter Applications with single-sided ZVS and an adaptive Ringing Suppression Technique

Abstract

This paper proposes an integrated bootstrapped Half-Bridge (HB) gate driver, which is used in a synchronous boost converter for photovoltaic applications. The HB is operated with single-sided zero-voltage-switching (ZVS) at the low-side (LS) or high-side (HS), dependent on the inductor current sign, to minimize switching losses. The gate driver architecture is based on segmented and distributed output stages with split outputs for turn-on and turn-off. During turn-on, the gate current is limited to 360 mA initially and gets boosted to 1.2 A after the Miller-Plateau (MP) has been actively detected. This minimizes the di/dt in the reverse recovery phase and, secondly, reduces the turn-on time by 26 %. A non-overlap time between LS and HS stage is guaranteed by a supervisor circuit. The boost converter achieves 98.6 % peak efficiency.