Abstract
Nowadays, medium- and high-power applications make use of silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs, and many times their parallelization is necessary. Unfortunately, this requirement causes an inevitable current unbalance between power devices, affecting the performance of power switches. Over the last decade, numerous studies have been conducted, proposing various techniques with the capability of mitigating current unbalance for a number of discrete parallel SiC MOSFETs. However, the realization of most methods requires knowledge of the technical characteristics of power devices, adding extra cost to the system, since screening is a time-consuming and costly process. This necessity reduces the possibilities of such a technique being implemented in power electronics applications, preventing the exploitation of the exceptional features of SiC MOSFETs. In addition, most of these techniques can suppress only the current unbalance, which occurs during turn-on and turn-off transitions. In this paper, an active auto-suppression current unbalance technique is proposed, requiring no device screening. The active method is a closed-loop system capable of sensing and eliminating the entire current unbalance between parallel SiC MOSFETs automatically, actively, and independently of the cause. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed technique.
Highlights
Nowadays, a significant portion of energy needs is covered with the use of renewable energy sources (RES), reducing the environmental impact
In the starting of the application, the number of the required operating cycles will be decreased, allowing the balancing process to require only a few balancing cycles until the current balance is achieved
This paper presents an active auto-suppression current unbalance technique for a number of parallel-connected silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs
Summary
A significant portion of energy needs is covered with the use of renewable energy sources (RES), reducing the environmental impact. Due to this fact, power electronic applications are in a state of continuous development and evolution. Among WBG semiconductors, SiC MOSFET is one of the most popular WBG semiconductor devices with the most probabilities of responding with reliability to the field of medium and high-power density applications, due to its more stable construction, comparatively lower cost and, relatively mature technology [1,2]. The most important advantages of SiC MOSFET are the higher breakdown voltage, its capability of operating in increased temperature environments, the high thermal conductivity, its superior switching characteristics with short turn-on and turn-off transient times and reverse recovery charge, the use of gate drivers with low complexity, the normally-off characteristic, and lower onstate resistance. Due to its unipolar structure, SiC MOSFET does not appear tail current enabling the reduction of switching losses and higher switching frequency [1,3,4]
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