Active Gate Driving With Full 6-Bit Resolution for Different SiC MOSFETs Using Variable Gate Current Range Digital Gate Driver IC

To eliminate the need to redesign digital gate driver (DGD) ICs for each of a wide variety of power devices, the variable gate current (I
G
) range DGD (VIR-DGD) IC with full 6-bit resolution over all ranges was proposed and demonstrated to work in IGBTs [10]. The innovation of VIRDGD ICs was that a variable resistor on PCB allows one-bit I
G
(I
1BIT
) to be freely varied to achieve the full 6-bit resolution over all ranges for a wide variety of power devices. In this paper, VIR-DGD IC with variable maximum I
G
from 0.44 A to 4.4 A and I
1BIT
from 7.0 mA to 70 mA is applied to SiC MOSFETs for the first time. The trade-off problems between loss and noise during the turn-on switching in two types of SiC modules with 2.6 times different rated current have been successfully solved by an active gate driving using the same VIR-DGD IC.