A High Speed SiC Thyristor Gate Driver for Pulse Power Applications

This paper presents a current source gate driver for SiC thyristors in pulse power applications. The proposed driver provides a very high gate current slew rate while limiting the peak of the current pulse. The higher gate current slew rate achieves faster and thus more efficient device switching transition. In this paper, gate driver circuit description and experimental results for a 3kV SiC thyristor for a pulse power application are presented to verify the proposed concepts.