A novel active gate drive for HV-IGBTs using feed-forward gate charge control strategy

Gate drives of today's high-voltage insulated gate bipolar transistors (HV-IGBTs) are in most cases voltage source based and with fixed gate resistors. Consequently, the contradiction between high-speed switching for minimized power loss and low-speed switching for low noise and low switching stress cannot be resolved simultaneously. This paper proposes a novel active gate drive (AGD) which operates basing on the feedforward gate charge control strategy. The proposed gate drive is composed of both digital and analog parts to achieve flexible control of the turn-on and turn-off operation of the IGBT. Thus, the conflicting requirements faced with the conventional gate drive (CGD) can be satisfied. The effectiveness of the feedforward gate charge control strategy has been verified by simulations, and promising results have been obtained. Besides, a chopper circuit is establishing to validate the operation of the active gate drive.