A Comparison Review of the Resonant Gate Driver in the Silicon MOSFET and the GaN Transistor Application

The increasing transistor power loss brought by the high switching frequency places a limit to the future high power density converter design. A review of resonant gate drivers is given in this paper to provide a vision for its future application. Various resonant gate driver topologies from the prior-art research is categorized and thoroughly compared in terms of the implementation frequency and the percentage gate driver loss reduction.

Moreover, a case study of two representative resonant gate driver topologies is given. The conventional gate drive and two resonant gate drivers are implemented to driver Silicon MOSFETs and Gallium Nitride (GaN) transistors respectively. The feasibility and effectiveness of implementing resonant gate drivers in wide band-gap semiconductor transistors is discussed according to a detailed comparison of loss decomposition.