Abstract:
A gate driver IC is an important circuit bridging the voltage gap between control ICs operating at less than 5V and the power electronics operating above 100V. The conventional gate driver IC, however, just turns on/off the power transistors and shows the trade-off between the switching loss and the switching noise of the power transistors. In addition, the conventional gate driver IC need to be customized for a large variety of power transistors. To solve the problems, we proposed a programmable general-purpose digital gate driver IC, which dynamically changes the gate drive current during the turn-on/off transient with digital control bits. In the developed gate driver IC fabricated with 40V, 0.18um BCD process, the 6-bit gate control signals with four 160-ns time steps are globally optimized using a simulated annealing algorithm, reducing the switching noise by 37% and the switching loss by 47% at the double pulse test of 300V, 50A insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). The gate driver is also applied to a half-bridge inverter, where the gate driving waveform is changed depending on the load current.

Bio:
Makoto Takamiya (S'98-M'00-SM'14) received the B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. degrees in electronic engineering from the University of Tokyo, Japan, in 1995, 1997, and 2000, respectively. In 2000, he joined NEC Corporation, Japan, where he was engaged in the circuit design of high speed digital LSI's. He joined University of Tokyo, Japan in 2005, where he is now a Professor of Institute of Industrial Science. From 2013 to 2014, he stayed at University of California, Berkeley as a visiting scholar. His research interests include the integrated power management circuits for wireless powering and energy harvesting for wearable and IoT applications, and the digital gate driver IC for power electronics. He is a member of the technical program committee of IEEE International Solid-State Circuits Conference (ISSCC) and is a Far East Regional Chair in ISSCC 2020. He is a Distinguished Lecturer of IEEE Solid-State Circuits Society. He formerly served on the technical program committees of IEEE Symposium on VLSI Circuits from 2009 to 2017 and IEEE Custom Integrated Circuits Conference from 2006 to 2011. He received 2009 and 2010 IEEE Paul Rappaport Awards and the best paper award in 2013 IEEE Wireless Power Transfer Conference.