Integrated Solution for Driving Series-Connected IGBTs and Its Natural Intrinsic Balancing

The use of series connected IGBTs is still a current subject in literature, despite such a discussion having started in the 1990s. Though countless academic studies, there are currently no available commercial products on the market for medium voltage inverters (up to 4.16 kV) and lower power (up to 1 MW) using this technology. This is related to the difficulty of ensuring the dynamic and static voltage sharing between IGBTs, giving rise to relatively expensive and complex firing circuits, when compared to the components they intend to control. Therefore, this article aims to present a simple and low-cost alternative, still effective for driving low voltage series-connected IGBTs, specifically for the encapsulation TO-247 type. Experimental results are presented showing the behavior of the solution under several operating conditions.