A new resonant gate driver for switching loss reduction of high side switch in buck converter

In this paper, a new resonant gate driver circuits is proposed to reduce the switching loss of high side switch in buck converter. Hard switching causes major parts of the power loss in high side switch and limits high switching frequency application of DC-DC converter. The proposed resonant gate driver behaves more like the ideal current source driver which can fast turn-on/turn-off power switch to reduce switching loss. In addition, with proposed resonant gate driver, impact of parasitic gate resistance on switching speed of power switch can be greatly reduced. Test results show that, for buck converter with 12 V input voltage, 1.3 V output voltage, 10 A load current and 5.5 ¿ gate resistance, comparing to conventional driver, with the proposed resonant gate driver for high side switch, total efficiency of buck converter can be improved by more than 3.5%.