Investigation of a fast gate driver based on a half-turn planar transformer.

Abstract

This paper presents a magnetically isolated gate driver for the fast switching of IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) in compact pulsed power sources with sharp rising edges and flat-top pulses for the application of electromagnetic launch and food processing. The proposed gate driver is implemented based on a planar transformer with a half-turn winding arrangement to increase the amplitude of the driving voltage pulse. With the half-turn winding arrangement, the leakage inductance of transformers decreases by 31.1% compared to the interleaving structure. This decrease enables a fast rise time of the driving voltage pulse. Furthermore, the gate drivers are used to drive the IGBT switching a Blumlein pulse forming network. The results show that the di/dt of the applied commercially available Si IGBT is about 10.10 A/ns with a gate voltage of 50 V and a gate capacitance charging time of about 88 ns, proving the effectiveness of the gate driver and providing a high-performance driving scheme for the fast switching of Si IGBT.