Abstract
Short-circuit faults are the most critical failure mechanism in power converters. Among the various short-circuit protection schemes, desaturation protection is the most mature and widely used solution. Due to the lack of gate driver integrated circuit (IC) with desaturation protection for the silicon carbide (SiC) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), the conventional insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) driver IC is normally used as these two devices have similar gate structure and driving mechanism. In this work, a gate driver with desaturation protection is designed for the 1.2-kV/30-A SiC MOSFET and silicon (Si) IGBT with the off-the-shelf driver IC. To further limit voltage-overshoot at the rapid turn-off transient, the active clamping circuit is introduced. Based on the experiments of switching characterization and short-circuit test, the SiC MOSFET shows faster switching speed, more serious electromagnetic interference (EMI) issue, lower switching loss (half), and higher short-circuit current (1.6 times) than the Si IGBT, even with a slower gate driver. Thus, a rapid response speed is required for the desaturation protection circuit of SiC MOSFET. Due to the long delay time of the existing desaturation protection scheme, it is technically difficult to design a sub- μ s protection circuit. In this work, an external current source is proposed to charge the blanking capacitor. A short-circuit time of 0.91 μ s is achieved with a reliable protection. Additionally, the peak current is reduced by 22%.
Highlights
The increasing demand in high power density requires power converters to be operated at high frequency and high efficiency, reducing the size of filters and heat sinks, respectively
The comparison and design considerations are recommended for the design engineers to fully utilize the performances of silicon carbide (SiC) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET)
1.74 μs the existing works have proposed several advanced protection circuits with sub-μs short-circuit time, the complicated circuit topology makes it difficult to be implemented by the design engineers
Summary
The increasing demand in high power density requires power converters to be operated at high frequency and high efficiency, reducing the size of filters and heat sinks, respectively. The silicon (Si) insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) is most widely used in medium- and high-power applications such as motor drives in vehicle and traction due to the advantages of being easy-to-drive and having low conduction loss [1,2]. The turn-off tail current leads to a high switching loss [3]. The switching frequency of Si IGBT is normally limited below 20 kHz for hard switching power converters [4]. The emerging silicon carbide (SiC) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) is an attractive replacement of Si IGBT for high power density applications [5,6,7,8]. The high switching speed with increasing dv/dt and di/dt ratios makes the gate driver design for SiC MOSFET a new challenge. It may lead to parasitic effects including phase-leg crosstalk and electromagnetic interference (EMI) issues due to the ringings, which are where the early works mainly focused on
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