Active gate driving techniques for wide bandgap devices are required to reduce overshoot and parasitic ringing caused by high dv/dt and di/dt transients while at the same time enabling high switching speeds. To investigate this experimentally, highly flexible gate drivers are of great interest. This work proposes an easy-to-implement discrete multilevel active gate driver that allows the gate resistance as well as the gate-source voltage to be varied with high temporal resolution. The driver is experimentally evaluated in a double pulse setup. The results confirm the principle of operation by reducing the turn-on energy by 42% and increasing the switching speed of the drain-source voltage by 85% with an equal current overshoot compared to a constant 20 ohm driver.
