An Advanced Self-Regulating Gate Driver for IGBTs

To improve the switching behavior of insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs), this article presents and analyzes an advanced novel and simple voltage-source gate driver for IGBTs. Its operating principle is described in detail first. Afterwards, the novel drive method is compared with other existing active gate drive methods (AGDs), both by theoretical analysis of operating principle. It is concluded that the presented driver can achieve much lower delays and losses than other drivers. The driver hardware configuration is then and by experimental results, the presented driver is compared with conventional gate drive (CGD) method. Thereafter, the presented driver is tested to verify its capability to independently adjust the concerned switching characteristics. This independent regulating capability can help improve certain switching characteristics with only small influence on the others, bringing an overall switching behavior optimization. Finally, the presented active gate driver improvements on electromagnetic interference (EMI) performance, implementation simplicity and its total costs are shown and analyzed to highlight its advantages and practicability. The presented driver is attractive for real engineering applications.