Design and characterization of an integrated CMOS gate driver for vertical power MOSFETs

Currently, the trends in energy management are performance enhancement and increase in system reliability for the reduction of energy consumption. In this context, the integration of the gate driver within power transistors is particularly appropriate. This integration offers multiple advantages, from electrical and EMI performance improvement to power module size reduction, and reliability and functionality increase. This article presents a power MOSFET gate driver system developed with an approach which consists in including all the circuits required to drive a power switch on a single CMOS chip. The CMOS driver chip functionalities will be presented in this paper, and its design will be explained. Finally, experimental results of the fabricated chip used in a buck converter topology will be shown and discussed.