Sic Mosfet Gate Driver Circuit

Benefits of sic mosfets.

Sic mosfet gate driver circuit. Silicon carbide gate drivers a disruptive technology in power electronics. Gate circuit parameters of sic transistors differ slightly from those of common mosfet or igbt transistors and in order to be able to fully utilise the capabilities of these new devices it is necessary to employ appropriate drivers. Silicon carbide sic mosfets dramatically improve switching performance for high power inverter applications providing high breakdown electric field strength and carrier drift velocity while enhancing thermal performance. Table 2 highlights several important parameter comparisons between two different manufacturers of sic mosfets sic 1 and sic 2 and two best in class 900 v and 650 v super junction si.

Silicon carbide cannot realize its full potential without the right ecosystem in this case the gate driver. Get to know and compare various short circuit protection methods for sic mosfets. Sic mosfet gate driver streszczenie. An igbt mosfet has a threshold around 5v or even higher whereas with a silicon carbide mosfet the technology allows having a lower threshold around 1 or 2v see figure 8.

Each of the two gate drive channels is protected by a desaturation circuit. The ix6611 provides negative voltage to the gate from zero to minus 10v and positive voltage from 12v to 25v as long as the difference between negative and positive voltage does not exceed 30v. Power electronics today is about the constant pursuit of efficiency improvements as well as cost and size reduction. This article discusses one such driver for sic transistors.

The ic ix6611 an intelligent high speed gate driver can be easily used to drive silicon carbide sic mosfets as well as standard mosfets and igbts. The real benefit of the smaller sic mosfet die comes in the form of lower input capacitance ciss which translates to lower required gate charge qg. Controlling sic mosfet power switches with a full range of scale gate driver products figure 1. How to fine tune your sic mosfet gate driver to minimize losses l.

Application note 3 revision 1 1 2018 06 24 advanced gate drive options for silicon carbide sic mosfets using eicedriver summary 1 summary for each gate driver ic the availability of properties and supporting functions for driving sic mosfet is. In sic mosfet half bridges where the 3 3 mm channel to channel creepage distance between the two output channels of a dual channel isolated gate driver ic is insufficient a hybrid combination consisting of one single channel isolated gate driver ic for the boot strapped high side and one non isolated gate driver ic with truly differential. In the event of a short circuit the voltage across the mosfet vds rises until it hits a threshold which causes the desaturation circuit to drive both gate drive channels to. Due to faster switching time sic mosfets require a gate driver with higher peak current lower threshold.