Development Tools Aim to Overcome Designers’ Hesitation About SiC MOSFETs

by Levi Gant, Monolith Semiconductor, Round Rock, Texas, and Kevin Speer, Littelfuse, Chicago, Ill., How2Power Today, Jun 15 2017

Focus:
Some power converter designers remain hesitant to use silicon carbide (SiC) power MOSFETs because doing so requires changes in power converter design techniques. To counter this hesitation, device suppliers are developing reference designs and demo boards. This article describes two such tools from Monolith Semiconductor and Littelfuse that enable evaluation of their SiC components. The Dynamic Characterization Platform (DCP) allows designers to evaluate a SiC device’s switching performance on a per-cycle basis using a double-pulse clamped inductive load test. With the DCP, designers can extract a full suite of device switching characteristics including gate charge, switching times, and switching energies. The 5-kW Evaluation Converter Kit (ECK) is a platform for buck and boost converter-level testing, including converter efficiency, switch temperature, EMI, and noise sensitivity. Example test results demonstrate the reductions in circuit inductance and capacitance (and the associated reductions in filter size) that can be achieved by raising the switching frequency over a range of power levels up to 5 kW.

What you’ll learn:

• How to evaluate performance of SiC MOSFETs in buck and boost converters up to 5 kW

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