Current Adjustable Gate Drive IC with Propagation Delay Reduction Technique for High-Speed Power Transistors

Abstract:
A turn-on drive current adjustment circuit and propagation delay reduction circuit are implemented in a gate driver IC. A half-bridge evaluation board with depletion-mode GaN HEMTs was fabricated to demonstrate the slew rate and propagation delay improvement. The propagation delay was reduced by 11% while achieving the same output slew with the proposed technique compared to the common external gate resistor (RG) drive current adjustment. Unlike digital gate drivers, the proposed gate driver does not require additional ICs or control waveforms and can be easily introduced into existing power conversion systems.