A Novel Driving and Protection Circuit for Reverse-Blocking IGBT Used in Matrix Converter

A novel drive and protection circuit for reverse-blocking insulated gate bipolar transistor (RB-IGBT) is proposed in this paper. For the drive circuit, a dynamic current source is introduced to reduce the turn-on and turn-off transients. Meanwhile, the di/dt of the collector current and the dv/dt of the collector-emitter voltage are strictly restricted, so do the respective stresses. The drive circuit consists of a conventional push-pull driver and two controllable current sources-a current generator and a current sink. These two current sources work in switching transitions. For the protection circuit, a novel collector current detecting circuit suitable for RB-IGBT is proposed. This method detects the collector current by sensing collector-emitter voltage of the device. Further study shows that this method can be used to acquire the current signs in commutation transitions of matrix converter. A series of experiments has been carried out concerning the proposed drive and protection circuit and the experimental setup; results as well as detailed analysis are presented