Gate Drive Circuit Using SAW Filter Capable of Power and Signal Transmissions

Abstract

In power converter circuits, a gate drive circuit is connected to the power devices for the switching operation. The gate drive circuit transmits both signal and power to the power devices, simultaneously. At present, multi-level converter circuits using large numbers of devices have been proposed for power electronics circuits, but these are complicated to implement in a circuit. Hence, simplification of the signal and power transmissions of the gate drive circuit is required for circuit implementations. This paper proposes a gate drive circuit using SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) devices that can transmit signal and power to the power devices, simultaneously. To use the several-hundreds MHz signal output from the SAW filter as the gate signal, this paper presents the design procedure for the internal parameters of the detection circuit that demodulates the signal into a several kHz signal. The usefulness of the proposed design is demonstrated by experimental evaluation of a half-bridge inverter and gate drive circuit with SAW filters.