Search

Compared with silicon insulated-gate bipolar transistor, silicon carbide (SiC) metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (mosfet) presents good features that it clearly shows on its switching and thermal performance. However, the fast switching speed of SiC mosfet makes it much more difficult for solving the dynamic voltage imbalance problem caused by the parameter fluctuations of the SiC mosfets and drive circuits when they are connected in series. This article proposes an effective gate drive circuit and its dynamic voltage balancing control method to tackle this issue. The proposed method not only balances the dynamic voltage during high-speed switching but also adapts to the variation of the dc-bus voltage by utilization of overdrive control method (ODCM). Furthermore, to widen the control range of the ODCM, a switched-capacitor compensation method by switching and combining different drive capacitors into different values is proposed. The operation principles and the parameter design method are discussed in detail. The performance of the proposed series-connected SiC mosfets gate drive circuit and its dynamic voltage balancing control method is validated by experimental results. The dynamic voltage can be well balanced within the design range. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new active gate drive (AGD) for switching performance improvement and overvoltage protection of high-power insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs). In addition to the conventional gate drive (CGD) based on fixed voltage sources and fixed gate drive resistors, the proposed AGD has a complementary current source to provide extra gate drive current into the gate. Specific transient switching stages of the IGBT can be therefore accelerated, leading to higher switching speed and lower switching loss of the IGBT. Additionally, the turn-off voltage overshoot of the IGBT can be controlled at a preset reference value with a fast closed-loop overvoltage protection circuit. Moreover, the switching speed of the IGBT, including the turn-on/off delay times and the turn-on/off voltage slopes, can be effectively regulated with an adaptive switching speed control method. Accordingly, the gate drive is capable of operating the IGBT at specified delay times and fixed voltage slopes when varying the switching conditions (e.g., temperature, load current). The operation principle of the proposed AGD and control concept are presented. By comparing with the CGD, the proposed method is experimentally verified on a 3.3 kV/1.5 kA IGBT module in both double-pulse and multipulse tests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The silicon carbide (SiC) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) has a more serious voltage overshoot than the silicon insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) due to the fundamental differences of the devices’ parasitic parameters. In this paper, a novel low-inductance packaging structure for a wire-bond-based multichip phase-leg SiC MOSFET module to suppress the voltage overshoot is proposed. This packaging structure is based on the adjacent decoupling concept achieved by several decoupling capacitors to reduce the size of the commutation loop. The improvement in the packaging parasitics has been verified through an Ansys Q3D extractor. Furthermore, the influence of adjacent decoupling capacitors is analyzed in detail by frequency-domain analysis and verified with LTspice simulation analysis. Thereafter, the selection and thermal reliability of adjacent decoupling capacitors are expounded. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed packaging structure. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]