The external gate-driver resistors,
RG(ON) and RG(OFF) are used to:
- Limit ringing caused by parasitic inductances and
capacitances
- Limit ringing caused by high voltage or high current switching
dv/dt, di/dt, and body-diode reverse recovery
- Fine-tune gate drive strength, specifically peak sink and
source current to optimize the switching loss
- Reduce electromagnetic interference (EMI)
The output stage has a pull-up
structure consisting of a P-channel MOSFET and an N-channel MOSFET in parallel. The
combined typical peak source current is
10 A for UCC5350-Q1. Use Equation 1 to estimate the peak source current.
Equation 1.
where
- RON is the external
turn-on resistance,
which is 2.2 Ω in this example.
- RGFET_Int is the power transistor internal gate
resistance, found in the power transistor data sheet. We
will assume 1.8Ω for our example.
- IOH is the typical peak
source current which is the minimum value between 10 A, the gate-driver peak source current, and the calculated value
based on the gate-drive loop resistance.
In this example, the peak source
current is approximately 3.36 A as calculated in Equation 2.
Equation 2.
Similarly, use Equation 3 to calculate the peak sink current.
Equation 3.
where
- ROFF is the external
turn-off resistance,
which is 2.2 Ω in this example.
- IOL is the typical peak sink
current which is the minimum value between 10 A, the gate-driver peak sink current, and the calculated value
based on the gate-drive loop resistance.
In this example, the peak sink current
is the minimum value between Equation 4 and 10 A.
Equation 4.
Note:
The estimated peak current is also
influenced by PCB layout and load capacitance. Parasitic inductance in the
gate-driver loop can slow down the peak gate-drive current and introduce
overshoot and undershoot. Therefore, TI strongly recommends that the gate-driver
loop should be minimized. Conversely, the peak source and sink current is
dominated by loop parasitics when the load capacitance (CISS) of the
power transistor is very small (typically less than 1 nF) because the rising and
falling time is too small and close to the parasitic ringing period.