Design and implementation of a driver board for a high power and high frequency IGBT inverter

In an industrial project a soft-switching high-frequency IGBT voltage source inverter (VSI) system to supply a resistive-inductive load was developed. The inverter which consists of only four fast high-power 1.2 kV/800 A IGBT modules, delivers an output power of more than 100 kW at a switching frequency above 100 kHz. This high-power high-frequency product is a major challenge for today's power semiconductor modules. For this industrial application the driver boards had to be designed and implemented because no suitable gate drivers exist today on the market which fulfils the requirements to the control the high-power semiconductors at 100 kHz. In this paper the IGBT inverter system will be briefly presented. Next, the design and the hardware of the self-developed driver boards will be shown. Measurement results certify the successful implementation of the driver boards in the IGBT inverter system.