• The Transactions of the Korean Institute of Power Electronics
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• v.3 no.3
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• pp.222-230
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• 1998

This paper proposes a new gate drive circuit for high power IGBTs which can reduce the harmful effect of reverse recovery current at turn-on and actively suppress the overvoltage across the driven IGBT at turn-off without a snubber circuit. The turn-on scheme decreases the rising rate of the collector current by inereasing the input capacitance at turn-on transient when the gate-emitter voltage goes above threshold voltage. It results in soft transient of the reverse recovery current with no variation in turn-on delay time. The turn-off driving scheme has adaptive feature to the amplitude of collector current, so that the overvoltage can be limited much effectively at the fault collector current. Experimental results under various normal and fault conditions prove the effectiveness of the proposed circuit.