Novel Current-Source Multi-Level Inverter Driven by Single Gate Drive Power Supply

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel current-source multi-level inverter, which is based on a current-source half bridge topology. Multi-level inverters are effective to reduce harmonic distortion of the output voltage and the output current. However, the multi-level inverters require many gate drive power supplies to drive switching devices. The gate drive circuits using a bootstrap circuit and a pulse transformer can reduce the number of the gate drive power supplies, but a pulse width of the output PWM waveform is limited. Furthermore, high-speed power switching devices are indispensable to compose a high-frequency power converter but various problems of high frequency noise arise due to high dv/dt rate, especially in high-side switching devices.
The proposed current-source multi-level inverter is composed with a common emitter topology of all switching devices. Therefore, it is possible to operate with a single power supply of gate drive circuit, which allows stabilizing a potential level of all the drive circuits.
In this paper, effectiveness of the proposed circuit is verified with experimental results.