Analysis, design, and implementation of an improved gate driver forhigh switching frequency EV application

Abstract

Electric vehicle (EV) battery chargers operate from moderate switching frequency(MSF) to high switching frequency (HSF) to achieve high power density. Tooperate the HSF power electronic devices, the selection of gate drivers and itsassociated components is crucial. Laboratory developed gate driver circuits(GDCs) often fail to drive these HSF devices adequately due to noisevulnerability, PWM duty loss and common-mode currents. Further, at MSF and HSFranges, the gate-to-source terminals of the device are subjected to highvoltages due to unwanted noise resulting in false turn-on of the switch leadingto the converter failure. In this paper, firstly, an improved GDC and it'sassociated component selection criteria are proposed for HSF EV application. Theproposed GDC is simple in structure with minor components; thus, it iscost-effective and highly reliable. Secondly, the proposed GDC is compared withthe other commercially available competent GDCs. Power losses, cost and dynamicswitching performance are the figures-of-merit for the quantitative assessment.From the comparison, it will be shown that the proposed GDC exhibits an overallsuperior performance among the popular GDCs. Finally, the distinctive featuresof the proposed GDC are experimentally validated for several test cases and theobtained results are presented.