Practical Considerations on the Gate Drive Implementation for Three-Level Voltage Source Inverters

Abstract

This paper presents a new hardware implementation of gate drive circuits based on the charge-pump technique, which allows independent trigger and long turn-on time of the power switches. The proposed circuit is applied to low power neutral-point clamped multilevel inverters (NPC) with MGDs (MOS-gate driver ICs). Experimental results of a laboratory prototype are presented and demonstrate the validity of the design method