A Radiation-hard Gate Driver Circuit for High Voltage Application

Radiation-hard techniques are critical for aerospace power electronics. However, prior radiation-hard research is mainly aimed at low voltage devices, ICs, and applications. Radiation and high voltage operation environments for power devices and ICs such as gate-driver circuits that pose great challenges for equipment reliability. Thick gate oxygen devices in power integrated circuits are susceptible to total ionizing dose (TID). Considering the funneling effect, the thicker verse-biased junction depletion region of power devices increases the collected charges, which may result in a single event upset (SEU). A halfbridge gate driver circuit is proposed in this work, which consists of a novel radiation-hard high voltage LDMOS with both anti-TID ability and ideal breakdown voltage. The combinational logic and soft error blanking method are designed to eliminate the SEU. Implemented in a 0.8 μm 600V BCD process, the proposed gate driver is capable of restraining the total dose of 300k rad, pulsed laser single event effects (the laser equivalent linear energy transfer, LET=75 MeV.cm
²
.mg
^-1
), and running a three-phase brushless dc (BLDC) motor from a 150V DC bus.