Investigation of a fast gate driver based on a half-turn planar transformer

Diangeng Li; Zicheng Zhang; Jingming Gao; Lei Wang; Yijie Sun; Juntao He

doi:10.1063/5.0214911

Investigation of a fast gate driver based on a half-turn planar transformer

Rev Sci Instrum. 2024 Dec 1;95(12):124706. doi: 10.1063/5.0214911.

Authors

Diangeng Li¹, Zicheng Zhang¹, Jingming Gao¹, Lei Wang¹, Yijie Sun¹, Juntao He¹

Affiliation

¹ College of Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China.

PMID: 39630046
DOI: 10.1063/5.0214911

Abstract

This paper presents a magnetically isolated gate driver for the fast switching of IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) in compact pulsed power sources with sharp rising edges and flat-top pulses for the application of electromagnetic launch and food processing. The proposed gate driver is implemented based on a planar transformer with a half-turn winding arrangement to increase the amplitude of the driving voltage pulse. With the half-turn winding arrangement, the leakage inductance of transformers decreases by 31.1% compared to the interleaving structure. This decrease enables a fast rise time of the driving voltage pulse. Furthermore, the gate drivers are used to drive the IGBT switching a Blumlein pulse forming network. The results show that the di/dt of the applied commercially available Si IGBT is about 10.10 A/ns with a gate voltage of 50 V and a gate capacitance charging time of about 88 ns, proving the effectiveness of the gate driver and providing a high-performance driving scheme for the fast switching of Si IGBT.