Design of a control unit for advanced gate drivers featuring adaptive dead-time and diagnostics

The growing demand for high-performance power converters calls for the adoption of new strategies, not only in architectures, but also in electronic technologies. To take full advantage of wide-bandgap semiconductor (SiC, GaN) power devices, and to exploit their amazing capabilities, dedicated drivers need to be developed. This paper presents a control unit for advanced gate drivers, based on a finite-state machine (FSM), and discusses design criteria; the proposed design is verified by simulation in Matlab-Simulink. The presented automaton not only «follows» the power switch during its state transitions, but features also automatic dead-time insertion when the switch is operated in bridge configurations, and is able to provide important diagnostic and self-test information.