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Why design a discrete gate driver circuit?

A project log for 10kW (30kW pulse) Electronic Load

All we need to do get some big resistors and connect them up in different combinations, right?

tinfevertinfever 07/25/2023 at 00:130 Comments

While waiting for the load stage rev 2 PCBs to arrive, I'll share some of my thought process in deciding not to use an off-the-shelf isolated gate driver IC on the load stages. Switching the power to the load resistors is arguably the most important part of the entire design, and so a lot of work went in to designing, simulating, and testing it. (The second most important part is probably everything that keeps the inductive spikes from blowing up the MOSFETs.)

Tl;dr: I like making life harder for myself, I'm a terrible cheapskate, and my questionable goal to work down to 3.3V on the DUT's power supply eliminates essentially all off-the-shelf solutions.

Here is the deep rabbit hole I went down again in recently reevaluating the design and deciding not to use an off the shelf isolated gate driver IC with some real reasons, and some retroactive rationalizations:

The result of all of this is that there are no good solutions that meet my questionable requirements. I could add on more and more complexity, or stick with the discrete design that works even if it has a higher quiescent current draw and perhaps isn’t as fast as it could be.

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