OnChip Power Stage and Gate Driver for Fast Switching Applications The demand for lowcost integrated circuits for automotive applications is increasing, while their cost must remain low to keep the product competitive. In this scenario, a highspeed monolithic integrated circuit to control a load current is here proposed. It is composed by a level shifter and a gate driver for a high power switch in a DCDC Buck converter to be realized in a low cost technology. For chip area reduction, an nchannel vertical power transistor is chosen as power transistor. High switching frequency (up to 1MHz) can be used to reduce external components size. The device is optimized to achieve 94.4% efficiency. Implementation concept, schematic and layout will be shown.

Active Dual Level Gate Driver for Switching Losses Reduction in IGBTs Nowadays, most of the motor driving systems are still using IGBTs as power switches. Moreover, also for this kind of applications, energy saving is of the utmost importance. IGBTs driving solutions are traditionally implemented using a fixed output current for charging and discharging the switchu0027s gate. This solution, however, does not take into account Miller Capacitance (Crss) nonlinearity effects in recent device generation. As Crss value spreads at least of one order of magnitude over the collectortoemitter voltage (V CE ) swing, the fixed current produces two different dVdt, causing additional switching losses. In order to reduce them, a twostep gate driver is proposed in this paper. The presented solution has been firstly validated on a discrete concept board, then implemented in an integrated circuit developed in a  1boldsymbolmumathbfm  HighVoltage (HV) SOI technology. Simulation and bench results are presented, highlighting the advantages of this solution and defining future improvements.