High-Voltage Fully Integrated Gate Driver IC with Galvanic Isolation based on Embedded Coreless Transformers

The paper presents a single-channel gate driver IC with galvanic isolation that uses embedded coreless transformer technology. The IC is suitable for driving and monitoring Si-IGBTs or SiC-MOSFETs up to 1700 V and gate currents of ±3 Apeak directly. For higher gate currents, external post-amplifiers can be used. A 0.35 µm mixed-signal CMOS technology was extended by using a very thick isolation layer process to form high-voltage coreless transformers or capacitors between different metallization layers to get an impulse withstand voltage capability of > 10 kV.