A novel SiC J-FET gate drive circuit for sparse matrix converter applications

Three-phase AC/AC sparse matrix converters (SMC) show a low realization effort and a low control complexity and are therefore of potential interest for industry applications. In this paper a novel gate drive circuit for a SiC J-FETs to be employed in an AII-SiC-SMC is proposed. The gate drive requirements of SiC J-FETs are clarified and the operating principle of the driver circuit is discussed and practically verified in a bridge leg topology. The experimental analysis shows significant advantages of the proposed system over known SiC J-FET driver circuits concerning switching delay time and switching losses.

[1]  P. Godignon,et al.  A 4H-SiC high power density VJFET as controlled current limiter , 2002, Conference Record of the 2002 IEEE Industry Applications Conference. 37th IAS Annual Meeting (Cat. No.02CH37344).

[2]  M. Baumann,et al.  Novel three-phase AC-DC-AC sparse matrix converter , 2002, APEC. Seventeenth Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (Cat. No.02CH37335).

[3]  J. W. Kolar,et al.  Wide bandwidth low complexity isolated current sensor to be employed in a 10 kW/500 kHz three-phase unity power factor PWM rectifier system , 2002, 2002 IEEE 33rd Annual IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.02CH37289).

[4]  L. Lorenz,et al.  Key power semiconductor device concepts for the next decade , 2002, Conference Record of the 2002 IEEE Industry Applications Conference. 37th IAS Annual Meeting (Cat. No.02CH37344).

[5]  Johann W. Kolar,et al.  A gate drive circuit for silicon carbide JFET , 2003, IECON'03. 29th Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IEEE Cat. No.03CH37468).

[6]  J.H. Zhao,et al.  A gate driver based soft-switching SiC bipolar junction transistor , 2003, Eighteenth Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, 2003. APEC '03..

[7]  Thomas A. Lipo,et al.  Matrix converter topologies with reduced number of switches , 2002, 2002 IEEE 33rd Annual IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference. Proceedings (Cat. No.02CH37289).

[8]  Hans-Peter Nee,et al.  Design of a Gate Drive Circuit For use with SiC JFETs , 2002 .

[9]  T.A. Lipo,et al.  A novel matrix converter topology with simple commutation , 2001, Conference Record of the 2001 IEEE Industry Applications Conference. 36th IAS Annual Meeting (Cat. No.01CH37248).

[10]  J.W. Kolar,et al.  Evaluation of 1200 V-Si-IGBTs and 1300 V-SiC-JFETs for application in three-phase very sparse matrix AC-AC converter systems , 2003, Eighteenth Annual IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, 2003. APEC '03..

[11]  A. Radun,et al.  A 1-MHz hard-switched silicon carbide DC–DC converter , 2003, IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics.