The design includes a built-in compact and highly efficient isolated supply to power the output side of the gate driver, further enhancing its performance and reliability in demanding applications.
The Compact, Half-Bridge, Reinforced Isolated Gate Drive is a critical component in modern power electronics, providing essential isolation and control for high-voltage and high-power applications. Its compact size and robust design make it ideal for various industries, including renewable energy, industrial automation, electric vehicles, and power supplies. This gate drive is crucial in enhancing power systems’ efficiency, reliability, and safety by ensuring precise switching of power devices such as MOSFETs, IGBTs, and SiC-FETs. Its reinforced isolation capability enables it to withstand high-voltage transients, making it suitable in challenging environments where electrical noise and isolation are paramount.
This reference design, TIDA-01159 by Texas Instruments, showcases a half-bridge isolated gated driver tailored for powering various power stages in applications like UPS, inverters, servers, and telecom equipment. It features the UCC21520 reinforced insulated gate driver capable of driving MOSFETs and SiC-FETs. The design integrates an isolated push-pull auxiliary power supply to energize the output of the isolated gate driver. With its compact form factor of around 30 mm × 35 mm, this design provides a fully tested and robust half-bridge driver solution that can withstand common-mode transient immunity (CMTI) of more than 100 kV/μs.
This design is compact size, suitable for driving power stages in mid- and high-voltage power converters, single-phase, and three-phase inverters. It offers a high-driving current (4-A source and 6-A sink), ideal for driving MOSFETs/SiC-FETs with currents up to 100 A and operating frequencies up to 2 MHz, leading to significantly reduced switching losses. The design also supports 3250-VPK and 3000-VRMS basic isolation, providing very high CMTI of over 100 kV/μs for robust operation in noisy high dv/dt environments.
The SN6505 is a low-noise, low-EMI push-pull transformer driver designed for small form factor, isolated power supplies. It is engineered to drive low-profile, centre-tapped transformers from a 2.25-to-5-VDC power supply. Achieving ultra-low noise and EMI is possible through slew rate control of the output switch voltage and spread spectrum clocking (SSC). On the other hand, the UCC21520 is an isolated dual-channel gate driver with a 4-A source and a 6-A sink peak current, intended for driving power MOSFETs, IGBTs, and SiCMOSFETs up to 5 MHz, offering best-in-class propagation delay and pulse-width distortion. An isolated gate driver is crucial for driving two power switches in a half-bridge configuration. Given its high-voltage operation, ample isolation between the primary and secondary sides of the gate driver is necessary.Â
This reference design from Texas Instruments has undergone comprehensive testing and includes a Design Guide, Bill of Materials (BOM), schematics, Gerber files, Printed Circuit Board (PCB) layout, and additional resources. Please visit the company’s website for further information on this reference design. To delve deeper into this design, click here.
