Design trends in smart gate driver ICs for power MOSFETs and IGBTs

Power MOSFETs and IGBTs are widely used in power electronic systems. As the Si-based power device technology is reaching its theoretical performance limit, more and more efforts have been put into the gate driver design to further improve the device performance. Recent trends for smart gate driver ICs are to integrate a variety of complex functions. This paper highlights the designs in recent smart integrated gate drivers. In particular, a smart IGBT gate driver IC with integrated collector current sensor and on-chip CPU for digital processing implemented using TSMC's 0.18 μm BCD Gen-2 technology is presented. In this novel current monitoring scheme, only the low voltage signal at the gate terminal needs to be processed, without the need to handle any high voltage signal on the collector/load side. This smart gate drive IC can provide current readings with an accuracy of ±1 A within the current ranges of 1 to 30A for turn-on and 1 to 50A for turn-off. Local current regulation can also be achieved without any extra discrete components or external digital controller.