Active Gate Driver Combining Current Source and Active Gate Resistors to Reduce Turn-on Switching Loss and Surge Voltage

Active gate drivers (AGDs) improve the trade-off between switching losses and surges by actively manipulating switching transitions. However, conventional AGDs have limitations to achieve enough high-speed driving. This is because most of them change their switching transitions with a few gate resistors and a fixed supply voltage for the gate driver. In this paper, a novel AGD that combines a current source and active gate resistors is proposed. The proposed circuit further reduces turn-on losses with current source compared to those of conventional AGD. The proposed circuit also introduces the comparable turn-off switching loss reduction as conventional AGD with active gate resistors. Double-pulse tests confirmed that the proposed circuit reduces turn-on switching loss by maximum 32.4 % compared to a conventional gate driver and maximum 4.82 % compared to conventional AGD.