Ultrafast Switching of SiC MOSFETs for High-Voltage Pulsed-Power Circuits

Due to their fast switching capabilities, silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs are increasingly used in high-voltage pulsed-power circuits where fast and flexible high-voltage pulses are required (e.g. for plasma-processing applications), such as in our solid-state Impedance-matched Marx generator. The turn-on time of SiC MOSFETs mainly depends on the gate-driving technique and its implementation. Therefore, many studies focus on SiC MOSFET gate-driving methods. In this article, a gate-boosting driving method that was previously proposed for IGBTs is optimized for SiC MOSFETs and applied to a very fast MOSFET to reduce turn-on time as much as possible. A prototype of the optimized gate-boosting driver was built and tested to assess its performance. The test results validate the effectiveness of the optimized gate-driving method and showed that a MOSFET turn-on time of below 2 ns is achievable at a high operating voltage and moderate current and below 3 ns for a wider range of load-current and operating-voltage conditions. Furthermore, current rise rates of 38.7 kA/μs at 356-A load current are possible. All these results are considerably faster than ever demonstrated before.