Abstract
Series connection of power semiconductor devices is selected in high voltage and high power applications. It is important to prevent the overvoltage from being induced across a device above ratings by the proper voltage balancing in the field of IGBT series connection. In addition, the overvoltage induced by a stray inductance has to be limited in the high power circuit. This paper proposes a new gate control scheme which can balance the voltage properly and limit the overshoot by controlling the slope of collector voltage under the turn-off transient in the series connected IGBTs. The proposed gate control scheme changes the slope of collector voltage by sensing the collector voltage and controlling the gate signal actively. The new series connected IGBT gate driver is made and its validity is verified by the experimental results for series connected IGBT circuit.