New Gate Driver for online adjustable switching behavior of Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (IGBTs)

This paper presents a new gate driver concept that allows an online, open-loop adjustment of the switching behavior of power semiconductors during operation. An inductive impedance instead of an ohmic impedance enables the required adjustable gate current and thus the desired gate voltage curve. The driver can individually adapt the switching behavior of the transistor to each individual switching edge. Thus for example the dv/dt and di/dt can be influenced, whereby the EMI behavior, the reverse recovery rate, the occurring overvoltage or the switching losses can also be influenced. The new gate driver was compared to a conventional resistive gate driver and the measurement results clearly show the advantages of the proposed driver concept.