Design of Area-Efficient Integrated Gate Drivers

Abstract

MOSFET gate drivers are important in modern power electronics due to the ubiquity of applications that require the fast and controlled switching of power MOSFETs. A controller serves as the first building block in many such systems, but with limited drive current and logic level voltage signals, it is unable to directly turn on a discrete power MOSFET. Gate drivers serve as the critical interface between the controller output and the power MOSFET.

This thesis explores some of the considerations in designing a gate driver for hardswitching applications and presents a new design for an area-efficient integrated gate driver. Simulation results show that, for a given die area, the new design gives better performance than existing topologies.