Power Electronics Europe April/May Issue 2022

www.microchip.com/en-us/product/MOSFET-SIC-1700V SILICON CARBIDE 19 www.power-mag.com Issue 2 2022 Power Electronics Europe To solve this problem, developers are turning to configurable digital gate driver technology to help them achieve new levels of SiC power density in these transportation and other industrial systems. The technology reduces switching losses and unlocking the full capability of SiCs by making all secondary-effect mitigation configurable. There are multiple ways to optimize the success of today’s digital gate-driver solutions so that designers can fine-tune configurations on the fly to reduce system cost and size by using lower- voltage parts and smaller heat sinks. These solutions also transform the design experience by substituting computer keystrokes for the many hours previously spent with a soldering iron and bins of gate resistors. Move to digital gate drivers Because SiC devices run faster than Silicon, designers have had only one choice: slow down the SiC device to avoid the secondary effects of faster switching, but this was at the expense of SiC technology’s fullest possible return on investment. While designers have used traditional analog gate driver techniques with Silicon-based designs to try and reduce a system’s EMI noise, catch short circuit conditions before they became a hazard, cut down thermal losses, and control voltage overshoots and ringing, these techniques are not adequate for SiC MOSFETs. Even with modifications, standard analog gate drivers are simply not designed from the ground up to address the special needs of SiC technology. Moving to digital gate drivers and combining them with SiC devices squeezes significantly more productivity from less energy. Plus, configurability enables designers to experiment with and then save configurations for a variety of gate driver parameters including gate switching profiles, system critical monitors and controller interface settings, cutting development time by months. The result is a gate driver that is tailored to its applications without having to change hardware, which helps to speed Digital Gate Drivers Enable Next Step in Optimizing SiC Power Management in Electrified Heavy Transport Vehicles SiC-based power-management solutions are proving their superior efficiency as compared to silicon especially in applications including electric buses, trains, trams, and other heavy transport vehicles. The same is true for higher-voltage solar inverters, rapid electric vehicle (EV) chargers, energy storage systems and aircraft flight actuators. Complicating SiC adoption, however, are the secondary effects produced by its faster switching speeds, including noise and electromagnetic interference (EMI), limited short circuit withstand time, overvoltage due to parasitic inductance and overheating that cannot be sufficiently managed using traditional analog gate drivers. Nitesh Satheesh, Tomas Krecek and Perry Schugart, Microchip Technology Figure 1: A conventional analog gate driver compared to the first and second generations of digital gate driver