An active gate driver for improving switching performance of SiC MOSFET

An active gate driver (AGD) is presented in this work for Silicon Carbide (SiC) devices to fully utilize their potential of high-speed characteristic in higher power density and higher efficiency applications. It can actively adjust the drive voltage during the switching transient of SiC MOSFET and with simple circuit implementation. Compared to the conventional gate driver (CGD) with fixed drive voltage, the proposed method has the capability of increasing the switching speed while minimizing the switching stress. The operation principle of the proposed AGD and control concept are introduced in detail. Finally, based on 1200V/19A SiC MOSFETs from CREE, experimental verification is carried out in double pulse test to illustrate the proposed AGD and the obtained results indeed verify its superiority than the CGD.