Design of Optimized Gate Driver of SiC MOSFET for High-Frequency High-Power-Density CSI

Wide bandgap (WBG) devices are becoming increasingly popular because they can switch with higher speed and work at higher switching frequency, resulting in a significant reduction of sizes of passive components for power converters. On the other hand, faster switching speed also makes the switching characteristics of the WBG devices more susceptible to parasitic parameters. In this paper, different gate drivers are compared for silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET, and a simple and reliable solution is designed optimally for a high-frequency high-power-density current-source-inverter (CSI). The practicality and feasibility of the optimized gate driver circuit has been confirmed by simulation and experiment respectively. Moreover, a 5-kW CSI prototype with optimized gate driver is designed and tested.