Novel driver circuit for switching performance improvements in SiC MOSFETs
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ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Novel driver circuit for switching performance improvements in SiC MOSFETs Xianyun Li1 · Yi Lu1 · Xijun Ni1 · Shuzheng Wang1 · Yu Zhang1 · Xinjie Tang1 Received: 13 February 2020 / Revised: 4 August 2020 / Accepted: 8 August 2020 © The Korean Institute of Power Electronics 2020
Abstract Silicon carbide (SiC) metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistors (MOSFETs) are expected to be an attractive replacement for Si MOSFETs in high power applications due to their high blocking voltage, high switching speed, and low switching losses. However, a high switching speed can lead to voltage and current overshoot as well as oscillation during the switching process, which results in additional losses and severe electromagnetic interference. It can also exceed the limit of the SiC MOSFET and cause irreversible damage to the device. Based on an analysis of the SiC MOSFET switching process voltage and current overshoot and oscillation generation mechanism, a voltage-injected active gate driver (AGD) was proposed. The proposed AGD can suppress the voltage and current overshoot and oscillation by injecting voltage into the gate of the SiC MOSFET during specific switching stages. Experimental results show that when compared with the conventional gate driver (CGD), the proposed AGD can suppress the voltage and current overshoot peaks by 16% and 12%, while reducing voltage and current oscillation times by 58% and 31%, respectively. Keywords SiC MOSFET · Overshoot · Oscillation · Active gate driver
1 Introduction Silicon-based power electronics devices have reached their theoretical limit and may not be able to meet the demands for the development of power electronics [1, 2]. Therefore, the SiC MOSFET has been regarded as an attractive replacement for the Si MOSFET due to its characteristics of low switching losses, high breakdown voltage, and high switching frequency. However, the high switching speed and the parasitic parameters in the circuit can lead to the voltage and current overshoot and oscillation during the switching process. This results in additional losses, severe electromagnetic interference, exceeding the limits of the SiC MOSFETs and causing irreversible damage to the device [3–5]. A lot of measures have been proposed to solve this problem. In [6] and [7], the switching characteristics of SiC MOSFET were improved by optimizing the PCB layout to reduce the parasitic parameters in the circuit. However, this method was unable to completely eliminate the parasitic
* Xianyun Li [email protected] 1
Nanjing Institute of Technology, Nanjing, China
parameters. As discussed in [8] and [9], the voltage and current overshoot and oscillation can be effectively suppressed by increasing the gate drive resistance at the expense of switching time and losses. In [10] and [11], RC snubbers were proposed to suppress oscillation during the switching process. However, the resistance and capacitance in RC snubbers are prone to cause additional losses. In [12], a variable-resistance AGD based on a complex
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