2020 IEEE International Symposium on Radio-Frequency Integration Technology (RFIT)

Injecting Digital into Power Electronics: Programmable
Digital Gate Driver IC for Power Transistors
Makoto Takamiya
University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
Abstract— A gate driver IC is an important circuit bridging
the voltage gap between control ICs operating at less than 5 V
and the power electronics operating above 30 V. The
conventional gate driver IC, however, just turns on/off thepower transistors and shows the trade-off between the switchingloss and the switching noise of the power transistors. Inaddition, the conventional gate driver IC need to be customized
for a large variety of power transistors. To solve the problems,
we proposed a programmable general-purpose digital gate
driver IC, which dynamically changes the gate drive current
during the turn-on/off transient with digital control bits. In thedeveloped gate driver IC fabricated with 40 V, 0.18 μm BCD
process, the 6-bit gate control signals with four 160-ns time steps
are globally optimized using a simulated annealing algorithm,
reducing the switching noise by 37 % and the switching loss by
47 % at the double pulse test of 300 V, 50 A insulated gate
bipolar transistor (IGBT).

REFERENCES
[1]

[2]

[3]

K. Miyazaki, S. Abe, M. Tsukuda, I. Omura, K. Wada, M. Takamiya,and T. Sakurai, "General-Purpose Clocked Gate Driver IC With
Programmable 63-Level Drivability to Optimize Overshoot andEnergy Loss in Switching by a Simulated Annealing Algorithm," IEEETransactions on Industry Applications, Vol.53, No.3, pp. 2350 - 2357,
May/June 2017.
T. Sai, K. Miyazaki, H. Obara, T. Mannen, K. Wada, I. Omura, M.
Takamiya, and T. Sakurai, "Load Current and Temperature Dependent
Optimization of Active Gate Driving Vectors," IEEE EnergyConversion Congress & Exposition, pp. 3292-3297, Sep. 2019.
T. Sai, K. Miyazaki, H. Obara, T. Mannen, K. Wada, I. Omura, T.
Sakurai, and M. Takamiya, "Stop-and-Go Gate Drive Minimizing Test
Cost to Find Optimum Gate Driving Vectors in Digital Gate Drivers,"IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition, pp.
3096-3101, March 2020.

Keywords—Gate driver, Power transistor, IGBT, Switchingloss, Switching noise

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
This work was partly supported by the New Energy andIndustrial Technology Development Organization (NEDO) ofJapan.

Fig. 3. Developed digital gate driver IC mounted on commercially available
IGBT module.

15V

63 PMOSs
IG

Turn-onsignalVCEVGEIGBTDigitalcontrolsignals(6bit x 2)

Constant RG
on PCBVCE

63 NMOSs
IG063

Time

Dynamic IG by software

Fig. 2. Conventional gate driver with fixed gate resistance (RG) and proposed
programmable digital gate driver.

978-1-7281-6506-6/20/$31.00 ©2020 IEEE

241

1.00.9Turn-onTurn-on(300V,50A)

0.80.70.6

30.4

5223 16200 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1Time (μs)

VGE

Gate driverConv.

4Optimized

ELOSS, NIN

RGIC

Proposed

ICnPMOSIL15V0 10 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Time (μs)

52Single-step drive

0.5

0.3

-47%

0.2

10

Single-step drive
086300 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Time (μs)

0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1
Time (μs)

-37%

0.1
01.3

1.1

nPMOS

Digital gate driverfOBJECT(ON) = 1.2

nPMOS

300V

ProposedSingle-step drive

6nPMOS

VDC=300V

Conventional

ELOSS, NAX
ELOSS (mJ)

Fig. 1. Function of gate driver in power electronics. Gate driver is interface
between microelectronics and power electronics.

510152025IOVERSHOOT (A)IOVERSHOOT, MIN

303540

IOVERSHOOT, MAXFig. 4. Measured switching loss (ELOSS) and collector current overshoot(IOVERSHOOT) at turn-on of IGBT in conventional gate drive and proposed gate
drive using digital gate driver IC. ELOSS is reduced by 47 % at same
IOVERSHOOT. IOVERSHOOT is reduced by 37 % at same ELOSS.

2-4 September 2020, Hiroshima