Optimization Platform to Find a Switching Pattern of Digital Active Gate Drive for Reducing Both Switching Loss and Surge Voltage

A gate driving for power devices is a key technology to further improve switching characteristics. With the help of digital gate driver IC, the switching behavior of power devices can be enhanced even under high-speed switching. In this paper, an evaluation platform for determining the optimal switching pattern of an active gate drive control is proposed for an inverter circuit. A high speed optimization system is built up to search for an advantageous switching pattern that reduces total switching loss of two power devices in an inverter circuit and constrains surge voltage simultaneously. The proposed online optimization demonstrates its feasibility for the full-bridge inverter circuit, which is rated at 500 V with digital active gate drive control. Experimental results show that the proposed optimization system is able to obtain optimal switching pattern from 6460 possible combinations of switching patterns within 15 min, which is 6 times faster than the previous study. Optimizations can also conducted under different load current conditions. Eventually, the obtained optimal pattern yields up to 42% reduction in the total switching loss when it constrains surge voltage to minimum compared with the conventional driving pattern.