Design of fast drivers

This report describes the one-year project done by Santiago Figueira for the Design and Technology of Instrumentation (DTI) program of the Eindhoven University of Technology between June 2013 and May 2014. The project was carried out for the Solid State Lighting group of Philips Research at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven. According to the guidelines of the DTI program, the one-year project required supervision by members of both the program and the company. Supervision in Philips was in charge of Research Scientist Dr. Albert Garcia I Tormo as direct supervisor during the project, and Principal Scientist Dr. Peter Lürkens as the project leader in charge of the project. Supervision from DTI was done by Dr. Jan-Jaap Koning, coordinator of the program. External supervision from another party was not necessary since all the people involved had experience and knowledge on the topics related to the project. The design of a Multi-Purpose gate driver with built-in safety features and high driving current capability for JFETs, MOSFETs and IGBTs is described. Three different variant of this driver are presented, one for each of these kinds of transistor. The included safety features for all the variants of the driver are: dead-time control; short-circuit protection; undervoltage lockout and galvanic isolation. A PCB design that allows the implementation of all the variants by only changing three components and populating or leaving empty an area of the board is described. Prototypes for each driver variant were also manufactured for testing and further validation of the design. These prototypes were designed as evaluation boards, with card-edge connectors for easy and fast connection as well as mechanical robustness. The results of the validation tests for the JFET, MOSFET and IGBT variants of the Multi-Purpose Driver are presented. These results confirm the correct operation of these drivers and their auxiliary safety functionalities. The driver probed to be fast, with propagation delays of less than 60ns. Finally, recommendations and potential opportunities of further improvement are discussed.