An Intelligent IGBT Gate Driver IC with Temperature Compensated Gate Side Collector Current Sensing

A temperature compensation system is proposed to improve the accuracy of a gate side collector current measurement technique for the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). This technique requires only access to the gate terminal of the IGBT. Therefore, it can be easily integrated into a gate driver IC. The proposed intelligent IGBT gate driver IC was fabricated using TSMC’s 0.18 micrometer 40 V Bipolar-CMOS-DMOS (BCD) Gen-2 process to demonstrate its ability to sense the collector current within an accuracy of ±1 A from 0 to 25 A. The intelligent gate driver IC has an embedded CPU, a delta-sigma modulator (DSM) analog-to-digital converter (ADC), a collector current sensing circuit, and a temperature sensing circuit. It is designed to interact with a customized IGBT device with an on-chip polysilicon pn-diode based temperature sensor.