Two Stop-and-Go Gate Driving to Reduce Switching Loss and Switching Noise in Automotive IGBT Modules

A new active gate driving method of “two stop-and-go gate driving (2S&G)” is proposed to reduce both the switching loss (ELOSS) and the collector current overshoot (IOVERSHOOT) in the turn-on of automotive IGBT modules. 2S&G includes two gate current zeros during turn-on and has only two parameters for a digital gate driver, which means low test cost for parameter optimization. Five different gate driving methods, including the conventional single-step gate driving (CSG), the conventional one stop-and-go gate driving [1], and digital gate drivings with 100 ns × 4 slots and 20 ns × 20 slots, are compared in the double pulse test using a 6-bit digital gate driver IC at 300 V and 150 A, and the proposed 2S&G showed the best performance. Compared with CSG, the proposed 2S&G reduces ELOSS by 42 % under IOVERSHOOT-aligned condition and reduces IOVERSHOOT by 18 % under ELOSS-aligned condition.