Soft-switching gate drive solution from slashes solar inverter costs

Pre-Switch announced that its revolutionary soft-switching IGBT and silicon carbide gate driver architecture, incorporating the Pre-Drive3 controller board, powered by the Pre-Flex FPGA, and RPG gate driver board, can decrease the cost of solar inverters. The two-stage architecture provides the same switching loss performance – or better – as a five-level design, producing reduced cost, control complexity and BOM count. Also, the company allows the simplification and size decrease of inverters and filters employed in renewable energy systems, allowing energy to be put back into the grid simply and efficiently.

The company's soft-switching platform facilitates a doubling of power output for a typical inverter or an improvement in switching speed by a factor of up to 20 times. Before, soft-switching has never been successfully-implemented for DC/AC systems with varying input voltage, temperature and load conditions. However, the company has surmounted the challenges by using AI to constantly-adjust the relative timing of elements inside the switching system needed to force a resonance to offset the current and voltage wave form, thereby reducing switching losses.

Explains Pre-Switch CEO, Bruce T. Renouard: “Our benefit for solar energy system designers is that our soft-switching architecture eliminates half of the system losses. So we are able to achieve performance levels with a simple two-stage design that would require five stages using conventional multi-level techniques.”`

He adds: “The architecture also allows the grid-tie filter size to be reduced by up to 66.67% for IGBT systems and by up to 80% for SiC MOSFETs. That is a huge advantage, not only in system size but also materials and shipping cost savings.”