Si829x Isolated Safety Gate Driver with ProVCD™

Hi. My name is Asa Kirby, and I'm an engineering manager with Skyworks. Today, I'm gonna talk about the Si829x isolated safety gate driver and our proprietary gate drive technology called ProVCD™.

Ask anyone who drives an electric vehicle what they think about, and usually hear the same thing: range. Every EV has a traction inverter between the battery and the motor. Its job is to convert DC from the battery into the AC that spins the wheels. It does this by switching silicon carbide power transistors tens of thousands of times every second.

Here's the catch.

Every one of those switching transitions dissipates a little energy as heat. Multiply that by tens of thousands of times a second across a whole drive, and it adds up to energy you paid to put into the battery that never turned into distance. What decides how much energy each transition costs is the gate driver. Traditional voltage mode gate drivers set the switching speed with fixed gate resistors chosen once during design and soldered onto the board.

This forces a compromise. Switch faster and you save energy, but risk overshoot an EMI. Switch slower and you give the energy away. Our ProVCD™ gate drive technology takes a different approach, driving the gate with precisely controlled current up to 15 amps that can be programmed in software cycle by cycle with no gate resistor at all.

This lowers the switching energy. So the question this demo answers is simple. How much further can that make your EV go? This is the Si829x traction inverter dyno.

It's a simulation you drive from the touch screen, and it builds the answer in three steps.

We start at the component level because the whole story has to rest on real measurements. We ran double pulse tests, the standard lab method for measuring switching losses on a 1,200 volt half bridge silicon carbide power module, comparing a traditional voltage mode driver against ProVCD at identical operating conditions across five DC link voltages from 500 to 900 volts and device currents up to 850 amps. These charts plot both drivers against motor torque, and the shaded band between the traces is the energy Pro VCD saves. A percentage on a chart is abstract, so next, we put that data into a whole vehicle. This is a simulated mid sized EV, about 2,200 kilograms, in an 800 volt 82 kilowatt hour battery driven through a standard certification drive cycle. The top trace shows the switching power being lost at the instant in the journey as you can see in the gap open up under hard acceleration where the currents are highest.

Down here, the two battery gauges start together and slowly separate, but by the end of the cycle, we've saved a real number of watt hours. But a car battery is big, and a handful of watt hours doesn't sound like much next to it. So let's settle in with a fun way, a race. Two identical cars, same battery, same motor, same power module, running the same drive cycle over and over until the battery is empty.

The only difference between them is the gate driver, And they're off. Green flag. And for most of this race, you'll genuinely can't tell them apart. They're running the same cycle at the same speed, so they stay dead level, lap after lap.

The tail is the battery gauges. Watch them drift apart a little further every lap. Then the red flag comes out. The car with the traditional gate driver is out.

Done. It stops right there on the track, and ours just keeps going, alone now, putting real distance on it lap after lap until its own battery finally runs out and it takes the checkered flag. That final gap, how much further our car got before it stopped too, is the extra range. In this configuration, that's about 5.7

miles or nine kilometers on a roughly 288 mile range, right around 2%. Now 2% might not sound like much, but look at what we changed to get it. Nothing. The battery, the motor, same power module, same cooling, same everything.

We swapped a single IC, and the gate driver is one of the lowest cost components in the entire traction inverter. The bigger battery, no extra thermal management, no added system cost. That range is practically free. And you can spend it the other way too.

Instead of driving further on the same battery, what if you wanted the same range from a smaller one?

Tapping this range medallion answers that. You could reach the identical range with about eight fewer cells out of 428, roughly 1.6 kilowatt hours less per pack, weight and cost coming out of the single most expensive part of the car. That result comes down to how the gate driver itself works.

Most gate drivers on the market today are traditional voltage mode parts, many of them carried over from IGBT designs and pressed into service driving silicon carbide. That's the same fixed gate resistor post we just described, locked in at design time. The Si829x controls the gate with current instead, and that setting is in a software register. So the same driver can be tuned across operating conditions and reused across multiple inverter variants without a board change.

For your design, that flexibility pays off directly. Around 2% more battery range from the same battery or the same range from a smaller and less expensive pack. Removing the gate resistor networks and easing the EMI filtering burden makes the inverter board smaller and cheaper. And because the tuning happens in software, you skip the remove and replace resistor tuning cycle that stretches inverter development schedules, and you can carry one gate driver across a family of designs.

The Si829x isolated safety gate driver with ProVCD delivers current mode gate drive for lower switching losses, functional safety developed according to ISO26262 and suitable up to ASIL D, and software programmable configuration that replaces fixed gate resistors.

Whether you're designing traction inverters for passenger EVs, commercial vehicles, or any electrified platform, or you just need a gate driver that supports rigorous functional safety while giving you real efficiency gains, the Si829x with ProVCD™ helps enable inverters that turn less of your battery into heat and more of it into distance.

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