Gate Driver Circuit Design for High Repetition Pulsed Power Modulator

In this paper, a new gate driver circuit is proposed to drive high voltage SiC MOSFET(Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor) of a solid-state pulsed power modulator. This gate driver circuit is designed to output pulses with repetition rates of several hundred kpps, and 1200V SiC MOSFETs are used as the main switch. In addition, a compact discharge structure was considered so that the volume of the modulator generating an average output of 10 kW could be designed to be within 26 liters, and thus a compact discharge structure based on an integrated gate driver of a discharge switch and a pull-down switch was implemented. In the experiment, synchronous stability was confirmed through gate synchronous driving tests of 12 discharge switches and pull-down switches, respectively. Based on this, a high repetition pulse output of 10 kV 150 kpps was finally performed, and the reliable operation of the proposed new gate driver and discharge circuit was verified.