Gate drive investigations of IGBT modules with SiC-Schottky freewheeling diodes

In this paper, a current source driver is presented for IGBT modules. For conventional voltage source gate driver, the influence of the gate drive resistance on switching performances is investigated for IGBT modules with SiC-Schottky freewheeling diodes. The influence on turn-off switching losses is marginal while a reduction by a factor of 3 can be achieved for turn-on switching losses when the gate drive resistance reduced from 40Ω to 10Ω. The current source driver can achieve a turn-on loss reduction by a factor of 14 when compared to the conventional gate driver with 40Ω gate drive resistance, without a large I
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due to the SiC-Schottky freewheeling diode. Experimental results are presented to show the IGBT switching performance with this proposed fast gate driver.