Design of an Advanced Programmable Current-Source Gate Driver for Dynamic Control of SiC Device

Wang, Xiang; Wu, Haimeng; Pickert, Volker

doi:10.1109/apec.2019.8721941

Cited by 17 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Silicon carbide (SiC) power electronics is regarded as a potent alternative to state-of-the-art silicon (Si) technology with its superior properties in the aspects of frequency, efficiency, power density and operating temperature [13]- [17]. However, SiC brings not only the benefits, but also the challenges.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gate Threshold Voltage Measurement Method for Sic Mosfet With Current-Source Gate Driver

Wang

Wu²,

Pickert

2021

IET Conf. Proc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Gate threshold voltage is a classic thermo-sensitive electrical parameter (TSEP) for the junction temperature estimation and the gate oxide degradation, which is considered as a promising precursor for the online condition monitoring of power MOSFET. However, due to the fast switching transient, the gate threshold voltage of SiC MOSFET is much more difficult to measure than its Si counterpart. More specifically, the conventional measurement method mentioned in the datasheet obtains the gate threshold voltage during the turn-on transient, which requires the measurement to be completed within tens of nanoseconds. This paper presents a new approach to evaluate the gate threshold voltage with the assistance of a current-source gate driver. The advantage of the proposed measurement method is its lower requirement for the bandwidth of the measurement circuit, compared with the conventional method. The principle of the proposed method is demonstrated, followed by the simulation validation. A current-source gate driver is designed and constructed to assess the proposed method in experiment which shows that the measurement results can be used to evaluate the junction temperature effectively.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gate Threshold Voltage Measurement Method for Sic Mosfet With Current-Source Gate Driver

Wang

Wu²,

Pickert

2021

IET Conf. Proc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In contrast, current source gate drivers (CS-GD) have a high output impedance to damp oscillation, and there is no impact of the voltage drop in the gate drive owing to the direct control of the gate current. Thus, some different types of current source gate driver have been proposed to improve the switching performance of power semiconductors, such as constant current gate driver [11], resonant current gate driver [12], hybrid gate driver [13] and programmable current driver [14][15][16]. Despite using different structures, the fundamental features of such gate drivers are similar because of the same inherent current-source characteristics.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Investigation into the Switching Transient of SiC MOSFET Using Voltage/Current Source Gate Driver

Wu¹,

Wang²,

Gonzalez³

et al. 2021

IET Conf. Proc.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper investigates the influence of current-source and voltage-source gate driver on the switching transient performance of trench and planner SiC MOSFETs. Devices have been tested at different temperatures and switching speeds using the designed double-pulse testing system. To evaluate the performance of different gate driving approaches, the dynamic transients of SiC MOSFETs are analysed and discussed using different values of gate resistors and controlled gate currents. The results show that the current-source gate driver has a higher switching speed than voltage-source counterparts at the same transient changing rate of drain-source voltage, resulting in lower operating losses for the power devices. Therefore, current-source gate drivers can facilitate power converters to achieve higher efficiency compared with voltage-source gate drivers.

show abstract

“…However, recent publications show that SiC MOSFET have less reliable gate oxide performance [4], [5]. It is well known that the threshold voltage (Vth) is an important parameter to estimate the health condition of a MOSFET [6] and the shift of Vth has been investigated in various publications [7] [8], which reveals a close relationship between the Vth and the gate stress time. On the other hand, the experiments are all conducted in the time scale over seconds which do not cover the study of the short-time Vth shift issue that is at switching periods.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phenomenon of Short-Time Threshold Voltage Shift and Its Application in Junction Temperature Estimation

Xiang

Pickert

2021

2021 IEEE 1st International Power Electronics and Application Symposium (PEAS)

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Silicon carbide (SiC) has seen tremendous advancement in high-efficiency, high-frequency, and hightemperature applications during recent years. However, the gate oxide of SiC MOSFET is reported to be less reliable compared with its Si counterpart, introducing the problem of threshold voltage (Vth) shift. Recent publications have investigated Vth shift which are mainly based on the long-time scale ranging from seconds to several days. However, the Vth shift in a shorter time scale has not been widely discussed and studied due to its high bandwidth requirement in measurement. This paper proposed an investigation into the short-time Vth shift using a developed current-controlled gate driver. The phenomenon of short-time Vth shift is captured and analyzed, which shows that it occurs within the first microsecond of the gate voltage being applied. Moreover, a modelling approach using the logarithm equation is proposed to describe the relationship between the short-time Vth shift and the gate stress time. Experiments are conducted under different temperatures, illustrating the temperature dependency of the short-time Vth shift process.

show abstract

Design of an Advanced Programmable Current-Source Gate Driver for Dynamic Control of SiC Device

Cited by 17 publications

References 18 publications

Gate Threshold Voltage Measurement Method for Sic Mosfet With Current-Source Gate Driver

Gate Threshold Voltage Measurement Method for Sic Mosfet With Current-Source Gate Driver

Investigation into the Switching Transient of SiC MOSFET Using Voltage/Current Source Gate Driver

Phenomenon of Short-Time Threshold Voltage Shift and Its Application in Junction Temperature Estimation

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About