An Intelligent Versatile Model-Based Trajectory-Optimized Active Gate Driver for Silicon Carbide Devices

Abstract

Using silicon carbide (SiC) power devices can potentially improve the efficiency of a power electronic system, but it may also introduce severe electromagnetic interference (EMI) problems due to the fast switching speed. The conventional gate driver cannot provide the flexibility to adjust the switching speed of SiC dynamically. To address this issue, an intelligent versatile active gate driver (AGD) is proposed to achieve optimized switching trajectory for power devices. The proposed AGD has five operation modes, i.e., faster/normal/slower the turn-on process and slower/normal turn-off process. The availability of multiple operation modes offers extra freedom to improve the switching performance and enable it to be versatile across various systems. The proposed AGD can provide more switching speed adjustment resolution than the other AGDs allowing for fine tuning of the switching speed of SiC power devices. In addition, a novel modelbased trajectory optimization strategy is proposed to determine the optimal gate driver output voltage by trading the EMI noise against the switching energy losses. The functionalities of the multi-level AGD are validated with the experimental results. The hardware design consideration is also given for the product commercialization purpose.