Reduction of oscillations in a GaN bridge leg using active gate driving with sub-ns resolution, arbitrary gate-impedance patterns

Active gate driving provides an opportunity to reduce EMI in power electronic circuits. Whilst it has been demonstrated for MOS-gated silicon power semiconductor devices, reported advanced gate driving in wide-bandgap devices has been limited to a single impedance change during the device switching transitions. For the first time, this paper shows multi-point gate signal profiling at the sub-ns resolution required for GaN devices. A high-speed, programmable active gate driver is implemented with an integrated high-speed memory and output stage to realise arbitrary gate pull-up and pulldown resistance profiles. The nominal resistance range is 120 μΩ to 64 Ω, and the timing resolution of impedance changes is 150 ps. This driver is used in a 1 MHz GaN bridge leg that represents a synchronous buck converter. It is demonstrated that the gate voltage profile can be manipulated aggressively in nanosecond scale. It is observed that by profiling the first 5 ns of the control device's gate voltage transient, a reduction in switch-node voltage oscillations is observed, resulting in an 8-16 dB reduction in spectral power between 400 MHz and 1.8 GHz. This occurs without an increase in switching loss. A small increase in spectral power is seen below 320 MHz. As a baseline for comparison, the GaN bridge leg is operated with a fixed gate drive strength. It is concluded that p-type gate GaN HFETs are actively controllable, and that EMI can be reduced without increasing switching loss.