Stress test system development is increasingly aimed at meticulous reliability and robustness evaluation for power semiconductors under application conditions as well as qualification purposes. Newly developed silicon (Si) power devices need further investigation in terms of potential new failure mechanisms. A double pulse tester is utilized as a test vehicle for studying hard switching related failure modes. However, setting up such a repetitive reliability test for multiple channels requires substantial manual labour. This paper proposes an open loop current source gate driver (CSGD) with adjustable gate voltage which can be software programmed, enabling an operator to set variable turn on/off speeds without hand-operated switching speed adjustment by gate resistors. The CSGD performance is assessed with various hard switching speeds in experiment and simulation for a discrete TO-247 MOSFET and IGBT respectively. Finally, additional considerations are proposed for faster switching so as to overcome the inherent nonlinearities and the CSGD output impedance effects.

压力测试系统的开发越来越多地针对功率半导体在应用条件和鉴定目的下进行细致的可靠性和稳健性评估。新开发的硅 (Si) 功率器件需要进一步研究潜在的新故障机制。双脉冲测试仪被用作研究硬开关相关故障模式的测试工具。然而，为多个通道设置这样的重复可靠性测试需要大量的手工劳动。本文提出了一种具有可调栅极电压的开环电流源栅极驱动器 (CSGD)，该驱动器可以通过软件编程，使操作员能够设置可变的开启/关闭速度，而无需通过栅极电阻手动调节开关速度。CSGD 性能分别在分立 TO-247 MOSFET 和 IGBT 的实验和仿真中使用各种硬开关速度进行评估。最后，针对更快的切换提出了额外的考虑，以克服固有的非线性和 CSGD 输出阻抗效应。