Comparison of Ultrafast-Rise-Time Gate Drivers for Wide-Bandgap Devices in Sub-Microsecond Pulsed Power Applications

Pulsed power applications such as high-resolution medical imaging and transient plasma generation demand well-regulated pulses that are a few hundred nanoseconds in duration. To achieve pulse rise times on the order of a few ns, these systems favor the use of fast-switching semiconductor devices, such as GaN HEMTs and SiC MOSFETs. The switching performance of these transistors is partly dependent on ultrafast gate drivers that can generate very high vgs slew rates. There are a variety of discrete ultrafast gate-driver topologies in the state of the art, which can generally be classified as voltage-source, current-source, and gate-boosting approaches. This paper presents a framework for a fair comparison of these different gate-driver architectures, alongside the best-in-market commercial gate-driver ICs as references. Through simulations and experiments using a simple pulse-generation circuit, the advantages and tradeoffs of each topology are highlighted.