NXP GateDriver GD3160 Introduction

1. Introduction

With the rise of new energy vehicles, there are considerable opportunities in the three-electric field of automobiles. The three-electric industry refers to electric motors, power batteries, and electronic control systems. Speaking of power batteries, I believe many people are familiar with them, which involves what we call the BMS system. But this is not our protagonist today. Today we are going to talk about the electric motor. After the new energy vehicle is fully charged, when driving on the road, the whole vehicle relies on the battery pack for power, but the traction motor responsible for the body power cannot be driven by a low-power DC source. Therefore, an inverter must be used to convert the DC component into a high-power AC.

The inverter includes the main control MCU and the Gate Driver, which is the focus of this article. This device can convert the MCU's low-voltage PWM control into a high-current gate drive signal, thereby driving high-power transistors such as IGBT and SiC, and further driving the traction motor.

2. Gate Driver Introduction

Gate Driver, as a bridge between the main control MCU and the transistor, has the primary task of controlling the gate conduction and gate turn-off to switch the transistor according to the complementary PWM wave sent by the MCU.

Secondly, as a component that complies with the ISO-26262 standard and has a safety level of ASIL D, the high-voltage side and low-voltage side of Gate Driver GD3160 are isolated, and can communicate through coils to achieve high-voltage/low-voltage power supply monitoring, internal self-test BIST, directly obtain the external SBC safety status through Safing Logic, and dead zone control to ensure its normal operation. In addition, it can monitor the transistor terminal voltage VCE and gate voltage VGE in real time through INTA.

Once a fault such as a short circuit (detected by the Desat or I-sense pin) occurs, the GD3160 can turn off the transistor within 1us to avoid damage to the tube. At the same time, INTB (SPI configuration) can report related faults. After the fault is captured by the MCU, the corresponding SPI command can be sent to obtain the GD3160 status register, so that the MCU can know which GD3160 has the fault and take further action.

Compared with the previous generation GD3100, GD3160 has an additional fault reporting pin (INTA), and the gate voltage can reach 25V. The power supply of the high-voltage side gate drive can be selected between 14V and 21V. It also has a segmented drive function (this is an advanced gate drive technology. After the SPI configuration is enabled, the transistor voltage can be detected through the Desat pin, and the gate turn-off strength (in amperes) is gradually reduced according to the turn-off timing. The segmented drive slows down the turn-off process by reducing the short-term important part of the current during the turn-off process. This function can further reduce the voltage overshoot caused by the turn-off, which is an important means to reduce the turn-off energy consumption and increase the vehicle's cruising range.

In addition, GD3162 is a product that NXP will soon launch. It has stronger gate drive capability and a built-in DC link discharge controller. You can look forward to it.

If you are interested in GD3160, you are also welcome to visit the NXP official website and register for NDA to obtain more design and development information.

3. Reference Documents

[1] AN677710-AN13167_ HW and SW changes from GD3100 to GD3160(1.0).pdf

[2] HITACHI-NXP-WP.pdf

[3] AN675420-AN13129 Fault management, diagnostics, interrupt and priority table of GD3160 advanced IGBT and SiC gate driver(2.0).pdf

[4] ds587392 - GD3160 data sheet rev11.0 (9.2).pdf