An Ultra-Fast Short Circuit Protection for Three-Phase GaN Electric Drives

This paper proposes two ultra-fast short circuit protection methods based on stray inductance in a three-phase inverter consisting of GaN switches. The first method is called Stray Voltage Capture (SVC), based on the voltage dip on the inverter due to the presence of the stray inductance between the inverter and the DC-Link capacitor. The second method is called Stray Field Capture (SFC), based on a magnetically coupled circuit to capture a part of the changing magnetic field during a short circuit event. Both results in ultra-fast short circuit protection in less than 100 ns, which is a promising solution against the Single-Event Burnout failure type occurence.