MOS Controlled AC Switches implemented with Full driver power supplies and dead time management circuits

The paper presents an original technique to power supply transistors gate drivers in AC-AC MOS controlled power converters. The technique is based on power side energy source to self-supply the transistors. AC-AC MOS controlled converters are well known for their complex practical implementation due to numerous transistor use with numerous potential references. This requires many gate drivers and gate driver supplies. In addition, the MOS-MOS switching transition that takes place in this kind of converter is complex to manage and leads often to over voltages or over currents. The presented gate driver powering technique allows to simplify both, the global implementation of the converter and the MOS-MOS switching transition management. The self-powering technique simplifies the implementation and the technique can be fully integrated with the power switch to be controlled. This leads to a cost effective solutions. In addition, the very specific operation of the self powering technique is used to simplify switching transitions. In fact, the gate driver power supplies are sensitive to dv/dt and this is used to perform self powering during dead time switching transitions, leading to minimum dead time duration and reduced over voltages. The paper recalls at first how the self powering technique operates. Then, MOS controlled AC switch configurations are discussed with respect to monolithic integration issues. Then, the operation of a single phase AC-AC MOS controlled converter with self-powering technique and dead time management is presented. The very specific operation during switching transitions is underlined. A final part of the paper is dedicated to practical validation with numerous practical results and explanation