Comparison of Ultrafast-Rise-Time Gate Drivers for Wide-Bandgap Devices in Sub-Microsecond Pulsed Power Applications

Pulsed power applications such as high-resolution medical imaging and transient plasma generation demand well-regulated pulses that are a few hundred nanoseconds in duration. To achieve pulse rise times on the order of a few ns, these systems favor the use of fast-switching semiconductor devices, such as GaN HEMTs and SiC MOSFETs. The switching performance of these transistors is partly dependent on ultrafast gate drivers that can generate very high v<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">gs</inf> slew rates. There are a variety of discrete ultrafast gate-driver topologies in the state of the art, which can generally be classified as voltage-source, current-source, and gate-boosting approaches. This paper presents a framework for a fair comparison of these different gate-driver architectures, alongside the best-in-market commercial gate-driver ICs as references. Through simulations and experiments using a simple pulse-generation circuit, the advantages and tradeoffs of each topology are highlighted.