Current Source Gate Driver for SiC MOSFETs in Power Electronics Applications

The current source gate driver has an important function to reduce the switching losses by providing a near constant gate charging and discharging currents to switch rapidly. In this paper, a half-bridge current source gate drive circuit with a non-zero initial inductor current is investigated for a SiC MOSFET device (650V, 93A,SCT3022AL). To verify the effectiveness of the adopted topology, simulations have been performed using the OrCAD Pspice program. The turn-on and turn-off transitions of the adopted circuit is compared with the conventional voltage source gate driver. Simulation results demonstrate total power switching loss for employed current source gate driver to be significantly lower (55%) compared to the voltage source gate driver system.