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Technical Lecture

Gate Drive Circuits and Fault Protection

T19.5 - Demonstration of Efficiency Increase of 350 V-to-13.3 V Isolated DC-DC Converters for Electric Vehicles by Active Gate Driving

Wednesday, March 19, 2025
2:50 PM – 3:10 PM ET
Location: Level Three, A311
For the first time in the world, an active gate driving (AGD) is applied to a power converter product, and the efficiency increase of the power converter by AGD is demonstrated by measurements under switching noise aligned condition compared to a conventional gate driving. Specifically, the gate driver for a single Si power MOSFET comprising a 165 kHz, 350 V-to-13.3 V isolated DC-DC converter product for electric vehicles was replaced with a developed time-domain stop-and-go active gate driver, and the DC-DC converter efficiency and the spectrum amplitude at 27 MHz of the power MOSFET drain current of the conventional single-step gate driving and the proposed AGD are compared in measurements at 1.2 kW output. The results show that AGD reduces switching loss by 46% compared to the single-step gate driving under the drain current spectrum amplitude alignment condition, resulting in a 10% reduction in total DC- DC converter loss and a 0.9% increase in DC-DC converter efficiency from 90.5% to 91.4%.