SLUSCQ2E October 2017 – June 2024 UCC21520-Q1
PRODUCTION DATA
The bootstrap capacitor is charged by VDD through an external bootstrap diode every cycle when the low side transistor turns on. Charging the capacitor involves high-peak currents, and therefore transient power dissipation in the bootstrap diode may be significant. Conduction loss also depends on the diode’s forward voltage drop. Both the diode conduction losses and reverse recovery losses contribute to the total losses in the gate driver circuit.
When selecting external bootstrap diodes, it is recommended that one chose high voltage, fast recovery diodes or SiC Schottky diodes with a low forward voltage drop and low junction capacitance in order to minimize the loss introduced by reverse recovery and related grounding noise bouncing. In the example, the DC-link voltage is 800 VDC. The voltage rating of the bootstrap diode should be higher than the DC-link voltage with a good margin. Therefore, a 1200-V SiC diode, C4D02120E, is chosen in this example.
When designing a bootstrap supply, it is recommended to use a bootstrap resistor, RBOOT. A bootstrap resistor, is also used to reduce the inrush current in DBOOT and limit the ramp up slew rate of voltage of VDDA-VSSA during each switching cycle.
Failure to limit the voltage to VDDx-VSSx to less than the Absolute Maximum Ratings of the FET and UCC21520 may result in permanent damage to the device in certain cases.
The recommended value for RBOOT is between 1 Ω and 20 Ω depending on the diode used. In the example, a current limiting resistor of 2.2 Ω is selected to limit the inrush current of bootstrap diode. The estimated worst case peak current through DBoot is,
where