The term ‘One size fits all’ is attractive to manufacturers of clothing. If items such as baseball caps can be made in a single size for all customers, the manufacturer can cut costs by producing only one variant of each cap design. But a ‘one size fits all’ strategy for shirts or trousers would be a commercial catastrophe – the product would not fit most customers.
‘One size fits all’ is just as unhelpful for buyers of gate drivers for MOSFETs or IGBTs. The needs of different applications and different power switches vary widely: this gives gate driver manufacturers a lot of scope to optimise the features and performance of their products, depending on the use to which they are to be put.
One of the companies that does most to optimise its gate drivers is Infineon, which is known for its EiceDRIVER™ family of gate drivers. On the last count, in September 2023, Infineon produced an astonishing total of 436 gate drivers. Not surprisingly, the family includes gate drivers dedicated to different switch types – MOSFET, IGBT and HEMT – and to different materials: silicon, silicon carbide (SiC), and gallium nitride (GaN).
But within a range of 436 products, the optimisation options go far wider than this, enabling the designer to choose between isolated and non-isolated drivers, with or without an integrated current sensor, with various protection functions, and with widely varying trade-offs between performance, features and cost.
This means that, by choosing an Infineon gate driver, the designer can achieve the closest possible match to their application requirements, and so gain the best combination of power efficiency, behaviour in the application, and compliance with EMI limits.
It is easy to explore the possibility to optimise gate driver performance by using the product selection tree at www.infineon.com/gatedriver
This parametric product selection tool automates the process of finding the right gate driver product depending on the application requirements.
With 436 drivers to choose from, power-system designers can be confident of finding exactly the right product for their needs.