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Technical Dialogue

Power Modules / High Density Design

D11.3 - High Temperature Operation of Digital Gate Driver Integrated Into a Power Module

Thursday, March 20, 2025
11:30 AM – 1:30 PM ET
Location: Level One, Hall A3
Digital gate drivers (DGDs) have emerged as a promising technology to enhance the switching performance of power transistors compared to conventional gate drive circuits. DGDs offer significant improvements in energy efficiency and effectively mitigate voltage and current overshoots during turn-on and turn-off periods. This paper reports the experimental verification of the high-temperature operation of a DGD-integrated power module. In this study, a power module was fabricated with a 6-bit DGD, in which the DGD was mounted close to the IGBT to minimize gate voltage noise, and the high-temperature operation was then evaluated to discover the influence of IGBT chip heat generation. The integration of the DGD reduced the gate voltage spike by approximately 97%, while maintaining stable operation up to an ambient temperature of 130 °C. Despite the close proximity of the DGD and IGBT chips, heat transfer from the IGBT to the DGD was found to be negligible. As a result, with proper driver output stabilization and optimized thermal design, DGD-integrated power modules can achieve high-temperature performance at high temperatures similar to conventional power modules.