A new active gate driver for improving the switching performance of SiC MOSFET

This paper introduces a novel active gate driver (AGD) for switching control of the silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs. The new gate driver improves the current and voltage profiles by suppression of the overshoot problems. The main innovation of the proposed AGD is the modification of gate-source voltage slope in two stages for both turn-on and turn-off transitions with a simple closed-loop control, which directly implies to the control of di/dt and dv/dt. The new gate driver is validated by experimental results. Moreover, an analysis of performance and electromagnetic interference (EMI) is realized. The experimental tests have been developed with 100 kHz of switching frequency and 200 V of dc-bus, in hard-switching conditions. The results show that the proposed AGD can reduce EMI problems with a minimum side effect on the efficiency of the SiC MOSFETs.