Power Electronics Conference 2017
Hilton Hotel at Munich Airport/Germany
December 5, 2017
Presenter: Cliff Robins, European Business Development, AgileSwitch, LLC Time: 4:40PM - 5:05PM UTC +1 (Munich) Topic:
Intelligent Gate Drivers for SiC MOSFETs – Addressing Safe Operation, Efficiency & EMI Discussion: While offering significant benefits over traditional IGBTs, SiC MOSFETs present a new range of challenges for safe, efficient operation and high EMI environments. Cliff will discuss how to best address these issues - through implementing Augmented Switching and other Intelligent Gate Driver methods.
About: Bodo's Power Systems and ICC Media/AspenCore Europe are jointly
organizing this Power Electronics Conference with focus on Wide Band
Gap Semiconductors. This is a 1-day program featuring presentations by Siemens, Infineon, Semikron, Littelfuse, Wolfspeed, Danfoss, USCi, GeneSic, and other leading firms focused on Wide Band Gap products and applications.
Philadelphia, PA (October 2017) - A new SiC Power Stack Evaluation Sample is available from Semikron. The Stack is rated to 100kW at a switching frequency of 50kHz. This integrated assembly is driven by AgileSwitch Stack Electronics for use in a wide variety of systems including battery charging, solar energy, and industrial applications.
Each SiC Power Stack includes:
Full SiC half bridge modules
High performance DC link capacitor
Air-cooled heatsink with fans
Current sensors
AgileSwitch SiC 62mm Gate Drivers
AgileSwitch Analog Interface Board
Full Power Testing was performed at the rated specs to qualify the stack. A National Instruments GPIC and LabVIEW provided the user interface, PWM commands, and data capture.
Check out the links below to learn more about the stack and how it was tested.
Introduction
Electronics used in traction inverters are subject to a great variety of environmental conditions including dirt, corrosion, moisture, and chemicals. Additionally, high-voltage applications, above 3000V, require larger creepage-clearance distances to meet UL specifications. To avoid premature failure and ensure safe operation, the printed circuit board assemblies (PCBA) inside the inverter must be well protected.
Conformal Coating
Conformal coating adds a thin lacquer to all surfaces of the PCBA covering all exposed metal contacts. This service, that AgileSwitch provides for all of our products, can dramatically reduce the volume of an expensive enclosure and increase the dielectric withstand voltage of the product.
AgileSwitch recommends HumiSeal UV40 UV curable coating for a good balance of protection and cost. This material is MIL-I-46058C qualified, and IPC-CC-830 and RoHS compliant and recognized under UL File Number E105698. This material has excellent dielectric withstand voltage properties, humidity resistance, and chemical resistance. AgileSwitch also has experience with Humiseal 1A33 polyurethane and IB33 acrylic materials. Customers may also specify a material of their choice.
Approach
There are two approaches to conformal coating PCBAs: automated and manual.
Automated Process:
AgileSwitch issues a list of coating specifications, including material, thickness, and keep-out areas, to our subcontractor. The subcontractor programs a PVA Delta 6 Selective Coating/ Dispensing System with our specifications. The boards are washed in a batch cleaner and placed on a conveyor belt in the PVA machine. Each board is carried under an computer-controlled nozzle and the conformal coating is dispensed. The final coating is precise, repeatable, and very little material is wasted. This process does not require any manual masking.
You can see this process in action below on an AgileSwitch Gate Driver:
Top Side
Bottom Side
Manual Process:
The manual process follows a more conventional approach. Each board is cleaned in a batch cleaner and then a technician masks the keep-out areas using tape. Then, the boards are sprayed in a well ventilated area and cured. After curing, the masking tape is manually removed from all the boards to reveal the keep-out areas. This process is sufficient for many applications, but it requires hours of pre- and post-processing, it is not repeatable, and there may be inconsistencies in the coating thickness and coverage.
Summary
AgileSwitch offers conformal coating as a service for any of our products and highly encourages customers to use conformal coating for all high reliability applications.
In this episode of Power System Design TV from PCIM Europe 2017, Rob Weber, CEO of
AgileSwitch discusses their portfolio of IGBTs and SiC MOSFET Drivers.
And now introduces their full range of Stack Electronics.
We teamed up with Mersen and FT Cap, experts in bus bars, cooling, and capacitors, to develop SiC MOSFET and Si IGBT reference designs. AgileSwitch Intelligent Gate Drivers and Stack Electronics are featured in each stack.
The SiC design uses 62mm power modules from Wolfspeed or Semikron in a very compact 16kW/L, 150kW rated package, beating the DoE's 2020 target. The target application is heavy-duty vehicles.
The IGBT design is targeted for Energy Storage applications. It is built around Infineon's PrimePACK IGBT5 with .XT technology. The demonstrator achieved 25kW/L at 500kW.
Patented Augmented Turn-Off™ switching technique, robust high-noise-immunity design, advanced monitoring and fault reporting facilitate conversion from IGBTs to 62mm SiC MOSFET power modules
Philadelphia, PA—February 16, 2017—AgileSwitch, LLC, innovator of intelligent IGBT and SiC MOSFET gate drivers, introduces the 62EM (62mm Electrical Master) SiC MOSFET gate driver series. The easy-to-use, plug and play driver is compatible with most 62mm SiC MOSFET modules. Applications including heavy-duty traction vehicles, auxiliary power units in trains, buses and trolleys, induction heating systems and other high-power industrial systems are rapidly moving from IGBTs to SiC power devices. The 62EM Series is designed specifically to facilitate this conversion.
The 62EM driver incorporates AgileSwitch’s patented, software configurable Augmented Turn-Off (ATOff™) technology. ATOff addresses two significant impediments to the successful implementation of Silicon Carbide modules in high-power applications. By reducing turn-off spikes and ringing, both under normal operation as well as short-circuit (DSAT) conditions, SiC MOSFET modules can be safely operated in the higher frequencies that enable dramatic increases in power conversion density. This allows SiC MOSFET modules to be operated closer to their rated specifications, resulting in size, cost and performance improvements. The 62EM gate driver is designed for harsh, high-noise environments, with optional conformal coating. It is equipped with powerful diagnostic and troubleshooting tools and it continuously monitors critical parameters, such as temperature and DC link voltage.
“Designers want the benefits of switching at higher speeds using smaller, lighter, less expensive system components. But, today, this can only be achieved by reducing the switching efficiency, which effectively negates much of the benefits,” said Rob Weber, AgileSwitch CEO. “The 62EM Series enables them to have both higher switching frequencies and high efficiency by dramatically reducing the typical secondary effects of high switching frequency: voltage overshoots, ringing and false short circuit reporting.”
A whitepaper describing the performance improvements attained using ATOff is available for download.
Price: $128.94 (OEM quantities) Delivery: 2 Weeks, ARO
The patented Augmented Turn-Off (ATOff™) switching technique addresses two significant impediments to the successful implementation of Silicon Carbide modules in high-power applications. By reducing both turn-off spikes and ringing both under normal operation as well as short-circuit conditions (DSAT), SiC MOSFET modules can be operated in the higher frequencies that enable dramatic increases in power conversion density.
A whitepaper describing this technology and test results can be found here.
