High speed optical gate driver for wide band gap power transistors

This paper presents the design of a CMOS gate driver fabricated in 0.18 μm technology. Optical receivers are integrated to provide the highest dV/dt immunity. A configurable buffer with 7A current capability is also integrated. Two solutions of optical receivers and gate signal transfer are introduced. In both cases a particular attention is addressed to the delays and delay mismatches for high frequency converter applications. The effects of temperature, supply voltage and input photocurrent amplitude are investigated. Delay mismatches <;5ns are expected. This CMOS gate driver has shown by experiments high switching frequency operation (typically 1.5 MHz) with low overall propagation delays (<;25ns).