High-performance active gate drive for high-power IGBT's

Abstract

Abstract-This paper deals with an active gate drive (AGD) technology for high-power insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBT's). It is based on an optimal combination of several requirements necessary for good switching performance under hard-switching conditions. The scheme specifically combines together the slow drive requirements for low noise and switching stress and the fast drive requirements for high-speed switching and low switching energy loss. The gate drive can also effectively dampen oscillations during low-current turn-on transient in the IGBT. This paper looks at the conflicting requirements of the conventional gate drive circuit design and demonstrates using experimental results that the proposed three-stage AGD technique can be an effective solution.Index Terms-Active gate drive, gate drive circuit, gate resistor, insulated gate bipolar transistor switching transient.

Flexible dv/dt and di/dt control method for insulated gate power switches

“…The value of the current fraction is a linear function of . As the amplitude of the injected current at the gate node increases by reducing the value of , monotonically decreases as indicated by (1). Note that this particular circuit implementation does not permit , preventing overcompensation of the external Miller capacitance.…”

“…T ECHNIQUES are often desired for actively controlling the output terminal and of insulated gate power devices such as MOSFETs and insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) in hard-switched converters in order to reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI) and voltage overshoots without requiring bulky and lossy snubber circuits [1]- [4]. In hard-switched applications requiring series or parallel connections of several MOS-gated power switches, these and control techniques are critical to insuring that the voltage or current is properly shared among the power devices during the switching transients.…”

Turn-on Loss Reduction for High Voltage Power Stack Using Active Gate Driving Method

“…Fig. 1(b) shows the delay before the collectorvoltage rise, the overvoltage during the collector-current fall, and the tail phenomena at the end of the collectorcurrent fall occurring during the turn-off stages [3,[19][20][21][22][23]. Fig.…”

“…4 shows a block diagram of a passive gate drive unit which is widely used and accepted in the industry. The passive gate drive is composed of a current amplifier to charge the input capacitances of the IGBTs, and turn-on/off gate resistors for limiting the gate current [3,4]. The gate voltages of the IGBTs are selected based on the output characteristics of the IGBTs.…”

“…In the passive driving method, the IGBT gate drive circuits have fixed gate resistors. These resistors are selected to suppress the switching electromagnetic interference (EMI) to an acceptable level and limit the reverse-recovery current with minimal energy loss [3,4]. While meeting these requirements, the passive driving methods fail to achieve a good performance (such as short switching delay and high efficiency).…”