Suppression of switching crosstalk and voltage oscillations in a SiC MOSFET based half-bridge converter

Abstract

The silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET is characterized by high operating voltage, temperature, switching frequency and efficiency which enables a converter to achieve high power density. However, at high switching frequency, the crosstalk phenomenon occurs when the gate voltage spike introduced by high dv/dt and voltage ringing forces false turn-on of SiC MOSFET which causes a crow-bar current thereby increasing switching losses. In order to increase the immunity against the crosstalk phenomenon in a half-bridge configuration, this paper presents a gate driver for SiC MOSFET capable of generating the negative turn-off voltage without using a negative power supply. In addition, the effect of parasitic inductances on the switching response is analyzed and an RC snubber is designed using high-frequency based circuit reduction technique to dampen the switching ringing. The performance of the proposed gate driver and the designed RC snubber is validated using simulation and experiment at the 1 MHz switching frequency. The results show that the proposed gate driver with RC snubber eliminates crosstalk by maintaining any spurious gate spike below the gate threshold voltage.