Implementation of Miniaturized Monolithic Isolated Gate Driver

Abstract

Gate drivers are extensively used in many applications such as DC to AC inverters, switch controlling of battery charging, and AC to AC converters. All require a gate signal to drive the MOSFET. However, traditional drivers use optically coupling components to achieve a high level of isolation, which creates disadvantages like power consumption, large size, and low integration levels. Thus, this paper proposes a different solution that uses an on-chip transformer to provide power isolation instead of an optically coupling component. Moreover, the oscillator, transformer, rectifier, and data buffer can all be integrated into a single chip. In other words, the size of the driver can be reduced and its integration level can be increased. When compared with the traditional design, this circuit does not use the discrete solution method for power isolation, so it is not susceptible to external noise interference.