Nagarajan Sridhar from Texas Instruments recently filmed a video with us covering a demo of a solar panel inverter that uses Texas Instruments silicon carbide MOSFET gate drivers. He points out that the switching frequency of silicon carbide far exceeds the capability of that available through silicon IGBTs or MOSFETs. The demo circuit is a 10-kW inverter having a 99% efficiency, built with silicon carbide and TI gate drivers. The high switching speeds comes not just because of the SiC transistors, but also because of the speedy dual channel drivers.

Because silicon-carbide transistors switch so quickly, they incur a high dI/dT and dV/dT. Consequently, the drivers have a high common-mode transient immunity (CMTI), greater than 100 V/nsec.

TI uses an isolation technique that is capacitive. The working voltage is around 1.5 kV and the surge voltage is 12.5 kV.

All in all, a silicon-based inverter putting out the same amount of power as the silicon-carbide version in the TI demo would be about twice the size, Sridhar says.