Seminars Archive

High frequency power MOSFET's gate driver

Abstract
Nowadays, there is a strong demand for efficient resonant inverters operating at industry approved frequencies: 13,56 MHz and 27,12 MHz. Their main applications are induction and capacitive heating. Designing and constructing of such inverters presents many challenges. One of them is driving the gate of the RF Power MOSFET transistor. Available integrated drivers, dedicated for such operation, have many disadvantages including big power consumption (up to 60 W). However it is possible to make discrete drivers with considerably better performance. The presentation will discuss two example discrete drivers. They are dedicated for driving the gate of the Ixys RF Power MOSFET DE275-501N16A (Qg = 50 nC, Cg = 3.5 nF) with frequency up to 30 MHz. The first driver was made as a parallel combination of integrated, low power drivers. The second driver was built using the turbo switch resonant driver idea. Developed drivers were consuming only 1/3 of the power consumed by the commercial ones in same operating conditions.