A Discontinuous Current-Source Gate Driver With Gate Voltage Boosting Capability

In this paper, a novel discontinuous current-source driver (CSD) is proposed, in which the power MOSFET gate-source voltage is increased to more than the drive supply voltage. The proposed CSD is able to recover gate energy dissipated in a conventional driver. In comparison to the conventional gate driver, the proposed CSD achieves fast switching speed to reduce switching losses. A wide range of operating duty cycle, low circulating losses, and high Cdv/dt immunity are other features of the proposed CSD. In comparison to previous discontinuous CSDs, the special advantage of the proposed circuit is power MOSFET gate voltage boosting, which leads to reduction of Rds(on) and, thus, the conduction loss. The proposed circuit is appropriate for voltage regulators (VRs) with synchronous rectifier and also it is suitable for two-stage 48-V power pod applications and low-voltage converters. Two-stage VR for laptop computer CPUs is another application of this gate driver circuit to improve light load performance. A prototype of the circuit operating at 1 MHz is implemented, and the experimental waveforms justify the theoretical analysis.

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