Design and Testing of Isolated Gate Driver for Cryogenic Environments

Aiming to increase the power density of electrical systems and realize all-electric aircraft, research has been focused on immersing power electronics at cryogenic temperatures as they tend to have lower conduction and switching losses. To ensure proper switching of semiconductor devices at cryogenic temperature, their gate driver circuits should ideally be placed in close physical proximity and therefore in the same environment. Although some commercial off-the-shelf gate drivers have been tested at cryogenic temperatures, in this article we present a bespoke magnetically isolated gate driver for cryogenic temperatures. Experiments with the circuit immersed in liquid nitrogen verify the proposals of the article.