A Modular and Performance-Tunable Silicon Carbide Half-Bridge Building Block with Digital Gate Driver

This work presents the system-level design of a low stray-inductance printed circuit board based half-bridge power electronic building block (PEBB) using a high performance 1.7-kV silicon carbide power module to demonstrate the modularity and scalability for fast hardware prototyping. Also, a digital gate driver with two-level (2-L) turn-off is developed to address the tradeoff between voltage overshoot and switching losses, leading to a building block with tunable performance that can be tailored for different applications. Various clamped inductive load (CIL) tests were performed to validate the low inductance PEBB design and voltage overshoot mitigation with digital gate driver. In addition, the feasibility of using the designed PEBB for fast prototyping has been validated using dc/ac and dc/dc conversion scenarios.