A novel active gate driver for static and dynamic current balancing of parallel-connected IGBTs

In high power applications, the insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) are often required to be connected in parallel in order to withstand the large load current. However, the current of paralleled IGBTs may not be shared equally due to spread of parameters. The current unbalance in transient and steady state can result in overheat and overcurrent destruction of the devices. In this paper a novel active gate driver is proposed to optimize both the static and dynamic current sharing of paralleled IGBTs automatically. The proposed active gate driver does not need complex digital processing or current measuring and is therefore fast and convenient. Simulations have been done to verify the effectiveness of the proposed strategy and promising results have been obtained. Experimental results show that the proposed gate driver can effectively reduce the static and dynamic current unbalance between parallel connected IGBTs.