High Bandwidth Active Gate Driver for Simultaneous Reduction of Switching Surge and Switching Loss of SiC-MOSFET

Abstract

This paper investigates an active gate driver (AGD) for an SiC-MOSFET. The source current feedback type active gate driver utilizes the reactive voltage of the source wire inductance as a negative feedback signal to regulate the source current di/dt. Recently, the improvement of the switching performance of the AGD is limited due to the feedback system bandwidth. In this paper, a high bandwidth current feedback type power operational amplifier is applied as the gate drive circuit. Switching characteristics of the conventional resistive gate driver and the active gate driver are experimentally investigated by a double pulse test setup. The switching setup condition is 700 V / 80 A. This paper describes the construction of the AGD circuit and the experimental results. The over-shoot and ringing of the Vds and Is are reduced by using the active gate driver. In addition, the switching loss is simultaneously reduced.