Study on the Impacts of Signal Carrier in a Compact Gate Driver with Single Isolation Channel for Both Signal and Power Transferring

Abstract

Single isolation channel gate driver technique is proposed for more compact architecture, less components, as well as high dv/dt noise immunity. Carrier communication mechanism is adopted with PWM signal modulated with a carrier signal and the carrier signal is the control signal for gate driver power supply. As the gate driver power transmission and signal transmission sharing the same isolation channel, carrier frequency will not only affect gate signal transferring but also determines power consumptions of gate driver. The current works on single isolation channel gate drivers did not provide a comprehensive study on the tradeoff between gate driver power and signal transferring which results in either quite high power consumptions or poor PWM signal output. For the above reasons, the impacts of signal carrier on power and signal transferring are studied in this paper to provide design guidance for single isolation channel gate drivers.