Author Topic: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation  (Read 10285 times)

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Offline notadaveTopic starter

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #75 on: June 01, 2026, 04:38:59 pm »
I made an inventory of my drawer and found these potential types for testing:
SiC:
UF3C065040K
(SiC JFETs with a cascode optimized MOSFET, SiC cascodes are enhancement-mode power switches formed by a high-voltage SiC depletion-mode JFET and a low-voltage silicon MOSFET connected in series. The silicon MOSFET serves as the control unit while the SiC JFET provides high voltage blocking in the off state. This combination of devices in a single package provides compatibility with standard gate drivers)

OnSemi NTHL160120SC1
Infineon IMW12R350M1 (I like this one.)

SJ-Si:
STW45N60DM6 (We used this before and it was ok-ish.)
IPW60R180C7
Vishay SIHG11N80AEF
 

Offline notadaveTopic starter

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #76 on: June 02, 2026, 05:40:40 pm »
I did replace one phase, half bridge with the IMW12R350M1 SiC FET and it did seem to work = no smoke.
I did not make the measurements yet because there is more soldering to be done. :-/O
 

Offline notadaveTopic starter

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #77 on: June 03, 2026, 05:38:22 pm »
I am frustrated with power MOSFETs >200VDS. They seem to like to oscillate in ways that are "illegal" compared to the datasheet.

Yes they do and there is nothing you can do about it because:
  • Super junction Silicon MOSFETs are not suited to be used in applications where one of the FETs body diodes is conducting aka hard switching.
  • Packages without Kelvin contact hit the system into oscillation because there is huge di/dt as the FET becomes conductive but the other isn't closed and charged.
The values in the datasheet can not be complied with unless there is no open PN-diode.

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When I looked at old designs I saw that most had, in parallel with the Gate-Source, a series capacitor-resistor. I did not know why, what problem they were supposed to solve. Well, now I do.
There seems to be an oscillation during switching

That is unavoidable but can be dealt with in the mentioned way. The resistor must be in the order of 10^0 Ohm.

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Although the voltages clearly exceed the maximum ratings there is no immediate failure. Thus the question is: Does this even matter?

The voltage is over the inductance and thus does not damage the gate oxide. But the currents are huge, they must not flow for more than a few cycles.

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Does this have a name?

Common source induced gate ringing.

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The device manufacturers sure are not making an effort to point this out.

They sure do not, they will though point out if some products are explicitly suited: "for hard switching".
Look for the lowest possible Qrr and tau_rr; Do not concentrate on the Qoss.

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It seems that there should be a statement in most datasheets:
"This device requires external CGS = Ciss/2 (half gate-capacitance) and RGS = RG (gate-resistance) for dampening to comply with the gate source voltage (dynamic) maximum rating."
"The negative peak of UGS at the cut off after reverse recovery is exempt from the max. gate source voltage (dynamic) rating requirement."

Some things you just have to know. The question is why those before you did not teach you.
 

Offline temperance

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #78 on: June 04, 2026, 11:12:14 am »
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Some things you just have to know. The question is why those before you did not teach you

I believe that what you are doing is new to you. Fast switching power electronics is all about identifying the invisible parts in the schematic and understanding their impact.

Inductors / transformers are a special case. If you measure their stray capacitance with an LCR meter, what you measure is the lumped capacitance. How they behave in a real circuit when exposed to a high du/dt can't be predicted from the lumped capacitance. (Ignoring the core material which also exhibits some funny behaviour where Al varies with frequency and peaks just before the Al value drops of a cliff.)

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The voltage is over the inductance and thus does not damage the gate oxide. But the currents are huge, they must not flow for more than a few cycles.

If you are referring to the voltage induced across the source inductance, you must be careful. Low value resistors in 0805 and 1206 have very low value stray components.

The most valuable thing to have -apart from a fast oscilloscope- is a network analyser.


 

Offline notadaveTopic starter

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #79 on: July 05, 2026, 10:37:06 am »
We have now made many measurements and tested the system under temperature.
There were no further failures but most importantly:
The oscillations during switching have become negligible.
The lesson: Do not use Silicon Superinjunction MOSFETs as a motor driver!
 
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Offline Root01

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #80 on: Yesterday at 03:51:05 pm »
Fair enough — and honestly, I've been tearing my hair out over this same problem for a long time too. The conclusion I eventually came to is: don't use SJ MOSFETs in hard-switched applications.​ The Crss of a superjunction device varies extremely — violently — with VDS. SJ MOSFETs are fine wherever you have genuinely achieved ZVS or ZCS.
In CCM inverters or bridgeless PFC, be careful with SJ MOSFETs, because they may well not be the "easy to drive" kind.
I've tested SanriseTech's SRC60R017FB — a 600 V, 14.3 mΩ superjunction MOSFET. The website says "optimized for soft switching". Nowhere on the front page of the datasheet does it make any promise about being "easy to drive", or about being suitable for CCM, or about tolerating hard-switched operation. All of that should be read as a red flag the next time you select a MOSFET.
If you take WebPlotDigitizer, integrate Crss over VDS, and multiply by the dv/dt of VDS, you get an instantaneous Miller-current-vs-VDS curve. Take a perfectly ordinary, constant slew rate of 4 kV/µs — for a 400 V rail that means a VDS transition time of 100 ns or less — and you'll find that as VDS falls and sweeps through 30...20...10 V, the Miller current explodes, in some cases to 10–40 A. No gate driver IC on earth can source or sink that. That, I suspect, is why you almost never see an SJ MOSFET in a demanding hard-switched bridge. Ringing is bad enough on its own; add bridge shoot-through on top of it and things get genuinely dangerous.
My own measurements: with a UCC21520 (4 A source / 6 A sink) and a decent gate layout, on a 48 VDC bus (yes, that's a very low voltage, but it's enough to see the trend — for quite a lot of SJ MOSFETs, Crss has already stopped falling once VDS gets down to a few tens of volts, so going to a higher VDS doesn't change much), double-pulse test into an inductive load: with Rg anywhere from 0 up to 220 Ω I simply could not damp the VGS–VDS coupled ringing, on either turn-on or turn-off. Only when I raised Rg to about 300 Ω did the ringing vanish completely — but by then the switching time had ballooned to a horrifying 5 µs. Completely unacceptable.
On the same demo/eval board — it's actually a full bridge — so apart from the SRC half-bridge there's a second half-bridge built with FGH75T65UPD. Same double-pulse inductive test on that one: from Rg = 0 Ω all the way to 20 Ω the waveforms were excellent. There is a Miller plateau, but it's dead flat, with no ringing whatsoever, and the whole switching event is clean and crisp — both the VGS rise time and the VDS fall time are inside 100 ns.
The same story repeats itself on a great many SJ MOSFETs. I won't list them all here.
Evaluating Crss properly, and then picking a suitable driver, is a really important point. I noticed someone mentioning that an IGBT's antiparallel diode recovers fast, and that in a bridge it doesn't slam the opposing device with a nasty Irrm the instant that device turns on — which would wreck EMC and make the ringing worse. That's correct. But there's a more important issue than that one: IGBTs — the semiconductor generation before last — mostly have extremely, extremely low Crss, on the order of 1% to 10% of an SJ MOSFET's. In the same circuit, swapping in a device from the previous generation can actually give you better efficiency and more stable operation. Don't underestimate the development history IGBTs have been through.
If you absolutely must use an SJ MOSFET with hard switching and hard commutation, then first and foremost, check Crss. Second, check the MOSFET's transconductance, because it may not be "optimized for hard switching". Do you know what "optimized for hard switching" actually implies? It implies slow switching and low transconductance — but rugged. They deliberately lower the device transconductance: that's what first allows you to switch reliably at all, and only on top of that foundation does it let you throw a higher-current gate driver IC at it to minimize switching time and minimize switching losses. So "optimized for soft switching" is a very bad sign as far as transconductance is concerned — as someone pointed out earlier, such MOSFETs may well have lost the "easy to drive" property entirely, or in other words cannot be driven reliably under certain operating conditions.
Next: the MOSFET's body diode. Note this carefully — low Crss and a fast body diode are mutually conflicting requirements.​ Which means you cannot reliably use an SJ MOSFET in hard switching with hard commutation, because the two requirements fight each other. If you really must, there are a few — I once searched hard for them, but they're very rare.
You can see it in Infineon's CFD2 or CFD7 series: the body diode is fast — for a 40 mΩ / 60 A class part such as the very common 65F6041, Qrr is roughly 1.2 µC (?) — but its Crss curve is not encouraging at all, and you need a gate driver with at least 4 A of drive capability. Whereas in a part like CoolMOS G7, which is optimized for the fastest possible switching in order to minimize switching losses, the body diode performance is only so-so: 3 µC or more at the same rating. But look at its Crss — it's tiny. At the same dangerous VDS (say VDS has already fallen to 10 V during the transition), the Miller current of many MOSFETs exceeds 2 A, while the G7 stays at a few tens of mA. Its Crss only rises at the very tail of the switching event, when VDS has dropped to 5 V... 2 V... — but by then VDS is already so low that it can't disturb the gate.
That's all.
 
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Offline notadaveTopic starter

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Re: Power MOSFET (gate) ringing/oscillation
« Reply #81 on: Yesterday at 05:37:27 pm »
If you take WebPlotDigitizer, integrate Crss over VDS, and multiply by the dv/dt of VDS, you get an instantaneous Miller-current-vs-VDS curve. Take a perfectly ordinary, constant slew rate of 4 kV/µs — for a 400 V rail that means a VDS transition time of 100 ns or less — and you'll find that as VDS falls and sweeps through 30...20...10 V, the Miller current explodes, in some cases to 10–40 A. No gate driver IC on earth can source or sink that. That, I suspect, is why you almost never see an SJ MOSFET in a demanding hard-switched bridge.

We chose
IPW60R099C7
STW45N60DM6
for their very low Eoss.
We did not have trouble with the Crss.
The biggest issue was the Qrr.
We ended up making many measurements with different probes and equipment to make sure that what we were seeing was not common mode or other disturbance.
We even used fully isolated high bandwidth probes, each costing as much as a nice oscilloscope.
The drain gate capacitance was not the cause.
Check at >= 2 GSps if the initial voltage spike direction is consistent with a decreasing forward current through the body diode and an inductance in series with it at source !
 


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