Current-Driven IGBT Gate Driver Circuit Considering Four Operation Regions

IGBTs have both features of MOSFETs and Bipolar Junction Transistors (BJTs) and are used in a wide range of fields as power semiconductor devices. However, for their usage, there are problems of parasitic capacitances among their terminals, switching loss due to tail current at turnoff, and excessive overshoot owing to parasitic inductances of wirings. In this paper, first, we introduce the current-driven IGBT gate driver circuit with improving the trade-off between the output voltage excess overshoot and switching loss by dividing the operation region into four parts with the current drive during IGBTturnoff and pulling a proper gate current depending on the region. Compared with the voltage drive, the overshoot at IGBT turnoff is improved to -32% and the switching loss to -35%. Next, we show a devised circuit that detects changes in the gate voltage of a current-driven IGBT gate driver circuit to respond to changes in the voltage and current on the collector side of the IGBT; this enables real-time automatic discrimination of the IGBT operation region. This automatic discrimination of the operation region demonstrates the feasibility of the automatic current control.