ON Semiconductor has developed an ecosystem of evaluation hardware to support rapid evaluation and testing of gate driver solutions. This ecosystem consists of a Plug ‘n Play baseboard and a series of mini-driver boards featuring ON Semiconductor gate drive solutions.
Semiconductors enable highly efficient power electronic systems to convert electric power between AC and DC forms and between DC voltages, with switches acting as the workhorses of this power conversion. These switches include: power MOSFETs, IGBTs, Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductor devices, SiC MOSFETs and GaN HEMTs. In most topologies, these transistors are switched on and off at kHz to MHz frequencies. That is where gate drivers come in; every switch has a gate. The voltage on the gate controls whether the switch is on or off. And a gate driver is used to control the voltage on the gate of the power switch, but it is more complicated than that.
The core functions of a gate driver are to amplify the logic (on/off) signal from the controller to provide adequate drive current to turn the transistor on or off at the required speed, and to provide level shifting from the logic to the gate, particularly for high-side transistors. Additional functions can include shoot-through protection, under and over-voltage lockout, over-current detection, desaturation detection and galvanic isolation. The gate driver selection influences efficiency, reliability, safety and solution size.
Gate drive functions are also integrated into controllers for applications such as PFC or LED lighting. Gate drivers can come in single, dual, high-low, half-bridge, H-bridge, or even three-phase inverter topologies, among others.
To support the rapid evaluation and testing of gate driver solutions, ON Semiconductor has developed an ecosystem of evaluation hardware. This ecosystem consists of a Plug ‘n Play baseboard and a series of mini-driver boards featuring ON Semiconductor gate drive solutions.
This evaluation system allows system designers to rapidly compare the dynamic performance of different gate drivers with a specific power switch. The gate resistance, bootstrap components and gate load can be changed to optimize the switching profile. The mini driver boards are self-contained gate driver solutions, featuring one or more ON Semiconductor devices. These boards are designed to plug directly into the baseboard or to be easily substituted into an existing application board.
ON Semiconductor provides gate drivers for a wide variety of applications and markets, with many options to tailor to exactly the system needs. Their products have the performance, reliability and efficiency for industrial, high-performance computing and telecom environments. With a full portfolio of power switches and corresponding gate drivers, ON Semiconductor has the full system solution to fit the needs of any design.
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