A smart gate drive with self-diagnosis for power MOSFETs and IGBTs

This paper proposes a useful smart gate drive with self-diagnosis for power MOSFETs and IGBTs. This new method is based on monitoring of the gate charge and discharge currents. Two gate current monitoring circuits are proposed and validated with experimental results. The implemented smart functions include self-acknowledgement, gate drive connection verification, power device status diagnosis, gate dielectric wearout detection and prediction. The proposed method can detect abnormal conditions that occur either within the gate drive circuit itself or in the driven power device. It also features simple and low cost implementation and can be easily integrated into gate drive circuits or gate drive chips.