Precision delay matching testing for gate driver ICs on IFLEX™ tester platform

Green energy sources such as solar power, wind, and biomass ... are getting more attention especially after the nuclear crisis caused by earthquake in Mar. 2011 in Japan. The solar power has been considered to be the major contributor of the green energy. There are more than enough solar irradiations available to satisfy the world's energy demands. However the traditional photovoltaic (PV) systems suffer from various power losses, the performance shows average losses of about 20%-30% in electricity production. Some companies provide advance system architectures which can boost solar panel output power by up to 20%-25%. One of a key element of the system is the DC-DC converter [1]. Texas Instruments' high voltage gate driver ICs (HVIC) can be used as a DC-DC converter, half/full bridge applications or class-D audio amplifiers. There are challenges for the HVIC testing. First, the timing measurements for propagation delay matching in both buck and boost which need to be in nanoseconds range but the typical production automatic test equipment (ATE) specification of timing measurement unit (TMU) accuracy is approximate 2 nanoseconds (ns) and meanwhile, the output voltage of gate driver application can exceed 100 volts. Second, test time and multi-site testing have to be considered. In this paper, we have discussed the critical timing measurements and have successfully implemented the multi-site delay matching testing on IFLEXTM ATE platform with 100 picoseconds (ps) resolution while the boost is operating at 120V.