A Highly Integrated High Voltage Gate Driver IC with Bootstrap Diode Emulator

This paper presents a highly integrated high voltage gate driver integrated circuit (IC), which designed specifically for motor drives. The gate driver IC integrates the high voltage circuit and the low voltage circuit into one chip. It also integrates undervoltage protection, overcurrent protection, and error logic control to improve the reliability. In addition, the gate driver IC using an improved bootstrap diode emulator to implementing the integrated bootstrap function. Instead of an external discrete diode, an improved bootstrap diode emulator is implemented by high voltage laterally diffused metal oxide semiconductor (LDMOS). The gate driver IC is successfully implemented using a 1λm Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) process and its excellent performance characteristics are verified by experimental results. The experimental results indicate that the improved bootstrap diode emulator saves the circuit area and improves the system reliability compared with the traditional external bootstrap circuit.