Comparative Design of Gate Drivers with Short-Circuit Protection Scheme for SiC MOSFET and Si IGBT

Shan Yin, Yingzhe Wu, Yitao Liu and Xuewei Pan
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Shan Yin: Microsystem & Terahertz Research Center, China Academy of Engineering Physics, Chengdu 610200, China
Yingzhe Wu: School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 611731, China
Yitao Liu: College of Mechatronics and Control Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen 518060, China
Xuewei Pan: School of Mechanical Engineering and Automation, Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen 518055, China

Energies, 2019, vol. 12, issue 23, 1-15

Abstract: Short-circuit faults are the most critical failure mechanism in power converters. Among the various short-circuit protection schemes, desaturation protection is the most mature and widely used solution. Due to the lack of gate driver integrated circuit (IC) with desaturation protection for the silicon carbide (SiC) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET), the conventional insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) driver IC is normally used as these two devices have similar gate structure and driving mechanism. In this work, a gate driver with desaturation protection is designed for the 1.2-kV/30-A SiC MOSFET and silicon (Si) IGBT with the off-the-shelf driver IC. To further limit voltage-overshoot at the rapid turn-off transient, the active clamping circuit is introduced. Based on the experiments of switching characterization and short-circuit test, the SiC MOSFET shows faster switching speed, more serious electromagnetic interference (EMI) issue, lower switching loss (half), and higher short-circuit current (1.6 times) than the Si IGBT, even with a slower gate driver. Thus, a rapid response speed is required for the desaturation protection circuit of SiC MOSFET. Due to the long delay time of the existing desaturation protection scheme, it is technically difficult to design a sub- μ s protection circuit. In this work, an external current source is proposed to charge the blanking capacitor. A short-circuit time of 0.91 μ s is achieved with a reliable protection. Additionally, the peak current is reduced by 22%.

Keywords: desaturation; gate driver; protection circuit design; pulse current; short-circuit; Si IGBT; SiC MOSFET (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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