Reshaped Switching Trajectory of SiC MOSFET via Co-Optimized Active Gate Driver

The high switching speed of the SiC MOSFET significantly elevates the power density of the converter. However, it also results in undesired switching issues and challenges the safe operating area of the SiC MOSFET. Limited by the fixed gate resistance, the traditional gate driver generally fails to simultaneously manage all switching issues, such as switching loss, overshooting, ringing, delay, and crosstalk. In this paper, to characterize the controllable switching behavior of the SiC MOSFET, mathematical models dominated by the gate resistance are created. Moreover, to independently regulate each interval of the switching trajectory, a co-optimized active gate driver (AGD) with variable resistance is proposed. Comparative experiments are carried out to verify the proposed solution. It is concluded that, by deploying the AGD, the switching trajectory of the SiC MOSFET can be coordinately customized to mitigate the switching issues.