In recent years, Wide Bandgap (WBG) semiconductor based power devices suchas Metal Oxide Semiconductor Field Effect Transistors (MOSFET) have matured rapidly and are playing a significant role in high switching frequency power electronic applications.WBG materials such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN) possess a higher critical breakdown strength than silicon due to stronger atomic bond. It also shows greater thermal conductivity. Due to these properties, WBG semicon- ductors become a material of choice in different modern power electronic applications. In addition, using these devices result in the overall size reduction of the devices as higher doping levels can be achieved at similar voltage levels. A gate driver is an in- terface between the control signals and power devices. It plays a significant role in the switching behaviour of WBG devices. To increase the overall efficiency and reduce the footprint of the system high switching frequency operation of the devices is desirable. However, power consumption in the gate driving circuit increases with frequency. A viable strategy to reduce the gate driving power consumption is to use resonant gate driving technique where part of the energy stored in the gate capacitance is recycled. In this dissertation, a novel resonant gate driver (RGD) for WBG devices is proposed, designed and implemented which drives the semiconductor device using quasi-square wave by utilizing higher order harmonics. Firstly, the operating principles of the proposed gate driver circuit is presented. Secondly, a detailed characterization and analysis of power loss of the circuit are provided. Additionally, a comprehensive sim- ulation study of the proposed circuit is introduced. Moreover, a prototype of the iv proposed RGD was built and tested. Experimental results demonstrate that the pro- posed gate driving technique can significantly reduce power consumption in the gate driver circuit in comparison to conventional gate driving techniques.
