A Novel Dual Channel Isolated Current Source Gate Driver for Fast Switching MOSFETs

A new dual-channel discontinuous mode isolated current source gate driver (ICSGD) is proposed in this paper. The proposed gate driver can provide two isolated gate drive signals for two power MOSFETs in circuits where these switches are in sync. The proposed gate driver can achieve very fast turn on and turn off transitions, due to its current mode nature. In addition, this technique can achieve partial gate energy recovery by recovering a fraction of the RMS (CV2) energy, which is typically dissipated over the gate drive resistors in voltage source gate drive (VSGD) techniques. Thus, provides better efficiency. The proposed circuit consists of six transistors and a small pulse transformer to allow swift operation over a wide range of duty cycles. Current through the transformer is discontinuous to avoid conduction losses due to circulating currents such as in some resonant gate drivers (RGD). Consequently, the proposed ICSGD provides superior performance over its VSGD counterparts, especially in high-frequency (HF) operation. The design is implemented in both PSIM and Typhoon HIL (hardware in the loop) platforms. The model is verified with a match of results from PSIM and Typhoon. The PSIM & HIL results show that the ICSGD achieves a minimum of 20% efficiency improvement.