Study and Implementation of 600-V High-Voltage Gate Driver IC With the Common-Mode Dual-Interlock Technique for GaN Devices

Gallium nitride (GaN) power device is well known as a favorable alternative of silicon power device for the power management system. However, it is difficult to meet the demand of higher operating frequency when using the traditional high-voltage gate driver IC (HVIC) to control the GaN devices. In this article, we illustrated that the propagation delay of the high-voltage level-shifter structure is the primary factor in limiting the operating frequency of the HVIC, and a new high-voltage level-shifter structure named common-mode dual-interlock (CMDI) level-shifter structure is proposed, which can eliminate both the common-mode transient noise and differential-mode transient noise effectively without adopting resistance-capacitance noise filter. A better tradeoff between the dVS/dt noise immunity capability and the propagation delay can be achieved, which is verified by the numerous theoretical analysis and experimental results. Due to all, the GaN integration technology is not suitable for complicated circuits at present, a 600 V HVIC for GaN device adopting the proposed CMDI level-shifter structure is implemented with normal silicon-based bipolar-CMOS- double-diffused MOSFET (DMOS) technology finally. The experimental results show that it can achieve high dVS/dt noise immunity larger than 100 V/ns, low propagation delay less than 32 ns, and the allowable negative VS swing to -4 V at 5 V supply voltage.