Gate Drive Design for SiC MOSFET Device Characterization : Investigation into the impact of the gate inductance and resistance on the switching behaviour of SiC Power MOSFETs

Sammanfattning: Silicon Carbide as a wide-bandgap semiconductor has several physical and electrical advantages over Silicon for high voltage and high frequency applications. SiC as a MOSFET device has a lot of great characteristics like lower on-resistance and low input capacitances. However, due to its high switching capabilities, SiC MOSFET-based converter circuits experience higher dv/dt and di/dt transients and are therefore more susceptible to parasitic elements. This thesis investigates the interaction of the parasitic gate inductance and resistance on the switching behaviour of SiC DMOSFET (planar) and UMOSFET (trench). To examine this, a double pulse test (DPT) setup was utilised both in simulation and experimentally. The influence of the gate inductance and resistance on the oscillation behaviour in the VGS during the miller period was found to be dependent on the condition of the upper device. Furthermore, the upper device was discovered to have a high impact on the oscillations in the VGS via its source inductance. The gate inductance showed a mixed impact on IDS and VDS overshoot, with IDS overshoot reducing with increasing gate inductance and the reverse case for VDS. The gate resistance, however, showed a consistent impact on both IDS and VDS overshoot, with both reducing with increasing gate resistance. These results ultimately point to the impact of di/dt and dv/dt transients. An interesting result observed on these root causes showed that in the DPT arrangement used, lower test current levels may have a more significant impact on the oscillations in the VGS than higher test current when varying the test currents, with 20 A having the highest impact on the oscillations in simulations and 15 A having the highest impact in experimental verification. On the switching energy, the gate inductance was not shown to have a significant impact on switching losses while the gate resistance had a much more significant impact on the switching losses.