A 400 V Buck Converter integrated with Gate-Drivers and low-voltage Controller in a 25–600 V mixed-mode SiC CMOS technology

This paper offers the first demonstration of the design and layout of a fully integrated power converter in a monolithic Silicon Carbide (SiC) technology. A 400 V Buck Converter integrated with Gate-Drivers and Low-Voltage Control circuitry in a 25–600 V Mixed-Mode SiC CMOS technology has been presented in this paper. A new SiC technology has been developed for this design which has a feature size of 1 μm. This technology allows integration of High-Voltage Power FETs and Low-Voltage CMOS circuits on the same die with a common substrate. Both high-side and low-side Power FETs are N-type hence a bootstrap circuit is used, and the gate drivers use an isolated capacitive level shifter to translate the signals from the 25 V domain to the 400 V domain which is the input voltage of the Buck Converter. The load current is 1 A and the nominal output voltage is 100 V thereby meaning that the output power is 100 W. The switching frequency is up to 1 MHz, and the duty cycle can range from 10% to 90% signifying a wide range of operation of the converter.