Self-Powered Gate Driver for Normally-ON SiC JFETs: Design Considerations and System Limitations

Author

Peftitsis, Dimosthenis ; Rabkowski, Jacek ; Nee, H.-P.

Author_Institution

Dept. of Electr. Energy Conversion, KTH R. Inst. of Technol., Stockholm, Sweden

Volume

29

Issue

10

fYear

2014

fDate

Oct. 1 2014

Firstpage

5129

Lastpage

5135

Abstract

A circuit solution to the normally-ON property of the normally-ON silicon carbide junction field-effect transistor, namely the self-powered gate driver, has been recently proposed. This letter sheds some light on the design process of the self-powered gate driver concept as well as limitations from the system perspective. It is experimentally shown that the parameters of the self-powered gate driver must be chosen taking into account a tradeoff between a fast response and stable operation of the driver. Moreover, the influence of the shoot-through current in the fast activation of the self-powered gate driver is also presented.

Keywords

integrated circuit design; junction gate field effect transistors; silicon compounds; wide band gap semiconductors; SiC; normally-ON JFET; normally-ON silicon carbide junction field-effect transistor; self-powered gate driver; shoot-through current; Capacitors; Current measurement; JFETs; Logic gates; Power electronics; Silicon carbide; Voltage measurement; Gate drivers; normally-ON silicon carbide junction field-effect transistor; protection circuit;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Power Electronics, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0885-8993

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TPEL.2014.2320360

Filename

6805656