The bootstrap capacitor is charged by VDD through an external bootstrap diode every cycle when the low side transistor turns on. Charging the capacitor involves high-peak currents, and therefore transient power dissipation in the bootstrap diode may be significant. Conduction loss also depends on the diode’s forward voltage drop. Both the diode conduction losses and reverse recovery losses contribute to the total losses in the gate driver circuit.

When selecting external bootstrap diodes, it is recommended that one chose high voltage, fast recovery diodes or SiC Schottky diodes with a low forward voltage drop and low junction capacitance in order to minimize the loss introduced by reverse recovery and related grounding noise bouncing. In the example, the DC-link voltage is 400 V_DC. The voltage rating of the bootstrap diode should be higher than the DC-link voltage with a good margin. Therefore, a 600-V ultrafast diode, MURA160T3G, is chosen in this example.

A bootstrap resistor, R_BOOT, is used to reduce the inrush current in D_BOOT and limit the ramp up slew rate of voltage of VDDA-VSSA during each switching cycle, especially when the VSSA(SW) pin has an excessive negative transient voltage. The recommended value for R_BOOT is between 1 Ω and 20 Ω depending on the diode used. In the example, a current limiting resistor of 2.2 Ω is selected to limit the inrush current of bootstrap diode. The estimated worst case peak current through D_Boot is,

Equation 1.

where

• V_BDF is the estimated bootstrap diode forward voltage drop around 4 A.