New 3-phase gate drive solution boots switching speeds

25th March 2019

Pre-Switch

Lanna Deamer

0 0

Pre-Switch, a Silicon Valley start-up that emerged from stealth mode last year, has expanded its revolutionary soft-switching IGBT and silicon carbide gate driver architecture to cover 3-phase power systems. The platform, including the Pre-Drive3 controller board, powered by the Pre-Flex FPGA, and RPG gate driver board, enables a doubling of power output for a typical inverter, or an increase in switching speed by a factor of up to 20 times.

Hard-Switching is the most commonly-used technique for DC/AC power converters but it has numerous drawbacks, the largest of which is the introduction of switching losses - wasted energy produced while a transistor fully transitions between On and Off states.

These switching losses are responsible for a large percentage of power converter losses. In contrast, soft-switching minimises switching losses but is has never been successfully-implemented for DC/AC systems with varying input voltage, temperature and load conditions.

Pre-Switch uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to constantly-adjust the relative timing of elements within the switching system required to force a resonance to offset the current and voltage wave forms - thereby minimising switching losses.

Pre-Switch’s forced-resonant soft-switching topology replaces the traditional IGBT or silicon carbide driver with a common intelligent controller board, Pre-Drive3, and a specific plug-in RPG (Resonant Power Gate) module optimised for the customer’s chosen SiC or IGBT package. The Pre-Switch architecture delivers the same switching loss performance - or better - as a five-level design, but significantly reduces cost, control complexity and BOM count.

Bruce T. Renouard, CEO, Pre-Switch said: “Customers have called Pre-Switch’s soft-switching technology ‘the Holy Grail’ for power conversion. eV designers have been amongst the first to adopt this exciting technology because it dramatically-reduces iron core loses in electric motors at cruising torques, providing 5-12% more range. However, our soft-switching technology is also applicable to a wide range of industries, and is independent of device technology.”