A Cost-Efficient Active Gate Driver for Seamless Slew Rate Control of SiC MOSFETs

Silicon carbide metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistors (SiC MOSFETs) are widely used in high-performance power converters due to their superior switching characteristic. The increase of the switching speed improves the efficiency of the system, whereas this also brings undesirable problems, such as voltage spikes and crosstalks. Most existing gate driver methods cannot flexibly regulate device switching speeds to match system requirements. To facilitate the devices operating in the desired state, this paper proposes a cost-efficient active gate driver (AGD) for seamless slew rate control of SiC MOSFETs. By implementing two simple tunable current sources as the power supply, the proposed AGD regulates the turn-ON/OFF speed of SiC MOSFETs independently. The operation principle of the proposed AGD is presented, which enables a practical parameter design method. The effectiveness of the AGD is experimentally validated, which can provide a wide slew rate range of 2.08 to 20 V/ns. Besides, compared to other AGDs with similar features, this cost-effective scheme can save almost 90% of hardware costs. In addition, due to its simple hardware composition, this scheme has the possibility of being integrated into a single chip, which has promising industrial application prospects.