A Low Complexity Active Gate Driver to Damp the Oscillations Caused by Switching Power Transistors

Abstract

The reduction of overshoots/undershoots and oscillations affecting the switching waveforms in hard-switched power circuits can be achieved by exploiting Active Gate Drivers (AGDs). The ones proposed so far are featured by a large number of driving levels and time intervals, resulting in time-consuming optimization procedures. In this work, an AGD featuring two degrees of freedom is proposed and its effectiveness is experimentally validated. To this purpose, the undershoot affecting the drain-source voltage is considered as an indirect measure of oscillation damping at the power transistor turn-on.