Integrated Short-Circuit Protection Design Based on Dual-Channel Gate Driver for Series Connected Medium-Voltage SiC MOSFETs

Series connection of Silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs is needed for increasing the blocking voltage of available power devices (limited to 3.3 kV in the market) and has been extensively studied, particularly in the context of voltage balancing design during normal switching operations. In addition, significant attention must be given to the short-circuit (SC) protection due to the lower SC withstanding capability of SiC MOSFETs and the asynchronous action of series-connected devices. Therefore, integrating SC protection by considering the series-connected devices inside the module as an equivalent single device is of great concern to avoid device SC failure. Given the limited coverage of this topic in the current literature, this paper proposes a novel SC protection strategy for the aggregated half-bridge SiC MOSFET power module. In this configuration, the slope detection-based SC protection of one device can complement and interact with the desaturation detection-based SC protection of the other, thus achieving fast and effective SC protection with minimal redundancy.