Drive Circuit of 4-Level Inverter for 42V Power System

In the near future, the voltage of power system for passenger vehicle will be changed to 42V from existing 14V./ Because of increasing power and voltage ratings used in the vehicle the motor drive system has high switching dv/dt and it generates electromagnetic interference (EMI) To solve these problems multi-level inverter system may be used The feature of multi-level inverter is the output voltage to be synthesized from several levels of voltage Because of this feature high switching dv/dt and EMI can be reduced in the multi-level inverter system But as the number of level is increased manufacturing cost is getting expensive and system size is getting large. Because of these disadvantages the application of multi-level inverter has been restricted only to high power drives. The method to reduce manufacturing cost and system size is to integrate circuit of multi-level inverter into a few chips But isolated power supply and signal isolation circuit using transformer or opto-coupler for drive circuit are obstacles to implement the integrated circuit (IC) In this paper a drive circuit of 4-level inverter suitable for integration to hybrid or one chip is proposed In the proposed drive circuit DC link voltage is used directly as the power source of each gate drive circuit NPN transistors and PNP transistors are used to isolate to transfer the control signals. So the proposed drive circuit needs no transformers and opto-couplers for electrical isolation of drive circuit and is constructed only using components to be implemented on a silicon wafer With th e proposed drive circuit 4- level inverter system will be possible to be implemented through integrated circuit technology Using the proposed drive circuit 4- level inverter system is constructed and the validity and characteristics of the proposed drive circuit are proved through the experiments.