Authors - Souma Yamamoto, Yudai Abe, Akio Iwabuchi, Jun-ichi Matsuda, Anna Kuwana, Haoyang Du, Takafumi Kamio, Takashi Hosono, Shogo Katayama, Haruo Kobayash
Abstract - IGBTs have both features of MOSFETs and Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs) and are used in a wide range of fields as power semiconductor devices. However, for their usage, there are problems of parasitic capacitances among their terminals, switching loss due to tail current at turn-off, and excessive overshoot owing to parasitic inductances of wirings. In this paper, first, we introduce the current-driven IGBT gate driver circuit with improving the trade-off between the output voltage excess overshoot and switching loss by dividing the operation region into four parts with the current drive during IGBT turn-off and pulling a proper gate current depending on the region. Compared with the voltage drive, the overshoot at IGBT turn-off is improved to -32% and the switching loss to -35%. Next, we show a devised circuit that detects changes in the gate voltage of a current-driven IGBT gate driver circuit to respond to changes in the voltage and current on the collector side of the IGBT; this enables real-time automatic discrimination of the IGBT operation region. This automatic discrimination of the operation region demonstrates the feasibility of the automatic current control.Abstract -