A Compact Gate Control and Voltage-Balancing Circuit for Series-Connected SiC MOSFETs and Its Application in a DC Breaker

• Published in: IEEE transactions on industrial electronics (1982) Vol. 64; no. 10; pp. 8299 - 8309
• Main Authors: Ren, Yu, Yang, Xu, Zhang, Fan, Wang, Kangping, Chen, Wenjie, Wang, Laili, Pei, Yunqing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01-10-2017; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE)
• Subjects: DC circuit breaker; Electric potential; Field effect transistors; gate control; Logic gates; MOSFET; MOSFETs; Passive components; Semiconductor devices; series connection; SiC MOSFET; Silicon; Silicon carbide; Steady-state; Switched mode power supplies; Switching; Topology; voltage balancing
• ISSN: 0278-0046; 1557-9948
• DOI: 10.1109/TIE.2017.2711579

This paper presents a novel compact circuit combining function of gate control and voltage balancing for series-connected silicon carbide (SiC) metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET). Two series-connected SiC MOSFETs with the proposed circuit only require a single standard gate driver to achieve the gate control and voltage balancing during both steady-state and switching transition. Moreover, the proposed circuit is only composed of ten passive components. Therefore, the proposed circuit provides a low-cost and highly reliable method to increase the blocking voltage of the SiC MOSFET. The operation principles of the proposed circuit are theoretically analyzed. In addition, the high-blocking-voltage device is not only required in switching-mode power supply (SMPS) but also in dc-breaker applications. The proposed circuit is then modified to make it suitable to the dc-breaker applications. The simulation and experimental results validate the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed circuit in both SMPS and dc-breaker applications.