Experimental analysis of the switching behavior of an IGBT using a three-stage gate driver

In this work, a gate driver with multiple stages based on switched resistors is presented. The influence of the different stages on the turn-on and on the turn-off behaviour is investigated using experimental measurements conducted on a double pulse test bench. It is shown that, compared to a single-stage reference driver, switching loss improvements are possible while maintaining the same voltage overshoot and the same reverse recovery current, thus the same device utilization. As the switching loss determination is not trivial, a dedicated section is devoted to the turn-on and turn-off loss energy calculation. The paper concludes with measurements showing switching loss improvements of 9% and 26% for a turn-on and a turn-off event, respectively, using the same voltage overshoot and reverse recovery current peaks compared to an optimized single-stage driver.