SSTC pt. 10 - Gate drivers

Today, let's improve the gate driving circuitry of my Solid State Tesla Coil. Instead of driving the IGBT gates directly by IR2153 outputs, I now use current amplifying transistors. I decided for discrete gate current amplifiers over gate driving chips like TC4421 or TC4422, because I prefer common, easily available components. I used pairs of NPN+PNP bipolar transistors connected as emitter followers. They speed up the rise and fall time about 5x. The rise time improved from 200ns to 40ns and the fall time from 100ns to 20ns. I used BD139 + BD140 old school transistors from my old stock, but I may try some better ones in the future. The IGBT transistors in my halfbridge are AOK60B65H2AL, but I plan to replace them with faster DGTD65T60S2PT.

The first episode:
   • SSTC pt. 1 - intro  

The next episode:
   • SSTC pt. 11 - Mains voltage test & in...  

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