New 3-Phase Gate Drive Solution from Pre-Switch Doubles Power Boosts Switching Speeds and Increases eV Range

Pre-Switch, Inc., a Silicon Valley start-up that emerged from stealth mode last year, today expanded its revolutionary soft-switching IGBT and silicon carbide gate driver architecture to cover 3-phase power systems. The platform, including the Pre-Drive™3 controller board, powered by the Pre-Flex™ FPGA, and RPG gate driver board, enables a doubling of power output for a typical inverter, or an increase in switching speed by a factor of up to 20 times.

Hard-Switching is the most commonly-used technique for DC/AC power converters but it has numerous drawbacks, the largest of which is the introduction of switching losses - wasted energy produced while a transistor fully transitions between On and Off states. These switching losses are responsible for a large percentage of power converter losses. In contrast, soft-switching minimizes switching losses but is has never been successfully-implemented for DC/AC systems with varying input voltage, temperature, and load conditions. Pre-Switch uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to constantly-adjust the relative timing of elements within the switching system required to force a resonance to offset the current and voltage waveforms – thereby minimizing switching losses.  

Pre-Switch’s forced-resonant soft-switching topology replaces the traditional IGBT or silicon carbide driver with a common intelligent controller board, Pre-Drive3, and a specific plug-in RPG (Resonant Power Gate) module optimized for the customer’s chosen SiC or IGBT package. The Pre-Switch architecture delivers the same switching loss performance – or better – as a five-level design, but significantly reduces cost, control complexity, and BOM count.

Says Bruce T. Renouard, CEO, Pre-Switch: “Customers have called Pre-Switch’s soft-switching technology ‘the Holy Grail’ for power conversion. eV designers have been amongst the first to adopt this exciting technology because it dramatically-reduces iron core loses in electric motors at cruising torques, providing 5-12 % more range. However, our soft-switching technology is also applicable to a wide range of industries, and is independent of device technology.”
 

About Pre-Switch

Pre-Switch technology represents the quintessential elegance of human innovation. The industry-wide problem of hard-switching transistor losses—and their very real negative impact on virtually every aspect of the modern electrical world—had been overlooked by all but a few innovators. The steadfast belief that hard-switching losses were insurmountable locked engineers into the status quo and turned away investors that couldn’t understand the complex world of high power. The result is the electrical power world we live in today, built within the limitations of transistor hard-switching.

Pre-Switch was born while trying to eliminate distortion-causing losses in Class-D audio amplifiers. It was then presented to industry leaders in the power semiconductor market who couldn’t classify it within their existing product portfolios. But the concept of a world without switching losses—and the impact it would have on reducing wasted energy, lowering the cost of power converters, improving EV ranges and even reducing the burden on landfills—was too large to ignore. The team then re-grouped, secured aligned investors and brought in further team mates with a technical understanding of the magnitude of the change made possible by our technology.