A flexible and cost effective gate drive platform for rapid prototyping

There is a current movement within the scientific, engineering, educational and entrepreneurial communities called “making.” Most electronics makers are familiar with hardware offerings Arduino™ and Xbee™, which are user friendly rapid prototyping platforms for microcontrollers and wireless networks respectively; however an equivalent solution for power electronics is not available at comparable cost. This paper presents a well designed, low cost, flexible gate driver capable of interfacing with a variety of IGBT and MOSFET discrete or module packages over a wide operating space. The gate driver provides more than 2kV of isolation with an isolation capacitance of less than 5pF while supporting gate drive powers of up to 5W with bipolar 15V rails in ambient temperatures up to 40C. Measurements of the prototype gate driver verify performance and other design metrics while keeping the cost significantly below commercially available offerings.