A New High Efficiency Current Source Driver With Bipolar Gate Voltage

A novel bipolar current source driver (CSD) for power MOSFETs is proposed in this paper. The proposed bipolar CSD alleviates the gate current diversion problem of the existing CSDs by clamping the gate voltage to a flexible negative value (such as -3.5 V) during turn-off transition. Therefore, the proposed driver is able to turn off the MOSFET much faster with a higher effective gate current. The idea presented in this paper can also be extended to other CSDs to further improve the efficiency with high output currents. The experimental results verify the benefits of the proposed CSD. For buck converters with 12 V input at 1 MHz switching frequency, the proposed driver improves the efficiency from 80.5% using the existing CSD to 82.5% (an improvement of 2%) at 1.2 V/30 A, and at 1.3 V/30 A output, from 82.5% using the existing CSD to 83.9% (an improvement of 1.4%).