Design and Implementation of Digital Active Gate Control with Variable 63-level Drivability Controlled by Serial 4-bit Signals

Active gate driving techniques using fully digital circuits and ICs have been actively investigated in the past half-decade. It has been reported that they contribute to improve loss and overshoot voltage and current, simultaneously during switching transients. However, a major concern of the digital active gate driver is an increase in the number of input signals for a practical implementation. This paper presents a verification of a digital gate driver IC with variable 63-level drivability controlled by serial four-bit input signals to decrease the implementation size and cost. Experimental results in a half-bridge converter using Si-IGBT module prove that the proposed gate driver IC realizes the active gate control effectively as the same with the conventional IC with parallel inputs despite the reduced number of the input signals. It is demonstrated that the developed digital gate driver circuit contributes to reduce the number of the input signals and digital isolators by one-thirds, and footprint of the PCB by 20% compared with the conventional gate driver IC with parallel 12-bit signal inputs.