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IR2137: 3-PHASE GATE DRIVER WITH INTEGRATED IGBT PROTECTION
International Rectifier has now introduced the IR2137 to the AC drives market. This latest High
Voltage Integrated Circuit provides a monolithic solution to driving all six IGBT gate drivers, while
simultaneously providing full IGBT protection and soft shutdown. In contrast to the Floating Ground
Reference architecture discussed in the previous section, the IR2137 circuit enables a simple struc-
ture. The differences between the two architectures are summarized in Table 2.
Floating Ground System
Six Fast Optical Isolators
Two Hall Effect sensors and
Two comparators
Four floating power supplies
Snubber circuit or discrete soft
shutdown circuits
Brake IGBT drive circuit with
an optical isolator
IR2137 solution
IR2137
IR2137 integrated function with a
shunt resistor and a comparator
Eliminated (boot strap power)
Eliminated by integrated soft shutdown
function
Eliminated by integrated brake IGBT
driver circuit
Gate Drive
IGBT Protection
Additional Circuits
Table 2: Solution Comparison of Gate Drive and IGBT Protection
For the IR2137 circuit, as shown in Figure 5, the IR2137 and a micro-controller (
μ
C) share the same
ground potential – the negative DC bus potential. (This architecture is already the industry standard
in the micro AC inverter drive segment). Unlike its traditional counterpart, the IR2137 circuit requires
a single shunt resistor and associated comparator. With this, it can perform all modes of IGBT short
circuit protection.
Additionally, the IR2137 contains IGBT de-saturation logic in the circuit of each high-side gate drive,
as shown in figures 6 and 7. In the event of a Ground Fault condition, the DESAT pin is activated, and
the fault signal is transferred to the low side fault logic circuit. The low side fault logic then initiates the
simultaneous soft shutdown of all 6 IGBTs. When the soft shutdown signal is transferred back to the
high side, the active PMOS/NMOS transistor buffer goes into a high impedance mode and another
weak NMOS transistor becomes active to slowly drive the gate pin low. The shutdown softness can
be programmed by adding an external resistor to the SSD pin – thus allowing the user to optimize
softness for the specific gate charge of the IGBT. To eliminate the dv/dt induced false triggering of the
DESAT pin, there is a blanking filter delay of 2 microseconds at each high-side gate turn-on transi-
tion.
Figure 8 shows the oscillogram of the ground fault protection feature in the IR2137. In this measure-
ment, a size 4 IGBT, IRG4BC40KD, was used in conjunction with a turn-on resistor, Rg = 33
, turn-
off resistor, Rg = 16
, and soft turn off resistor, R
SSD
= 500
. The top trace in Figure 8 is the IGBT
gate signal (10V/div), while the middle trace is the V
CE
voltage (100V/div), and the bottom trace is the
IGBT short circuit current (40A/div). No snubber circuit was used for this test. One can see that the
de-saturation protection activates quickly and the soft shutdown feature virtually eliminates the over-
shoot voltage across the collector and the emitter.