Driving and Protecting IGBTs in Inverters

Overview:
At the heart of an inverter is the IGBT, a costly power device which must switch extremely fast and is required to withstand the high DC bus voltage. The efficiency and reliability provided by these power devices are of utmost importance to maximize the performance of the inverter.

Optocouplers are commonly used in inverters to provide safe galvanic isolation between the control circuits and to help protect against damage caused by high voltages in the DC bus. In particular, gate drive optocouplers are widely used to drive IGBTs since they can provide high output current for precise switching and fault detection features for IGBT protection.

The ACPL-339J is the industry's first dual-output gate drive optocoupler, uniquely designed to support a MOSFET buffer to maximizes gate drive design scalability and power conversion efficiency. It also offers a compact and cost-effective solution for protecting the IGBT with integrated features like UVLO, short circuit detection and "soft" IGBT turn-off.

Attendees will learn:

• How to drive IGBT for better power conversion efficiency
• How to protect IGBT to improve system overall reliability
• The advantages ACPL-339J and achieving system design scalability, efficiency and reliability

Who should attend: Power designers doing motor drives, industrial and renewable energy inverters, and switching power supplies

Ted Smith, Field Applications Engineer, Isolation Products, Avago Technologies
Ted Smith was born in Dayton, OH and received his Electrical Engineering degree from Ohio Univerity in 2001. He did postgraduate work at Ohio Univeristy, Hochschule Ravensburg-Weingarten in Weingarten, Germany, and the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL) in Tsukuba, Japan. Ted joined the power electronics industry in 2004, working for Fuji Semiconductor, then LEM Inc, before joining Avago in 2010.