Gigahertz Current Measurement for Wide Band-gap Devices

Abstract

In order to improve efficiency and reduce circuit size the switching speeds of semiconductor power devices are being reduced. This is being achieved by the use of wide band-gap semiconductor devices. Traditional current measurement techniques are unable to accurately measure these new high speed switching edges, due to a lack of bandwidth and high insertion inductance. In this paper a 1.6 GHz bandwidth, scalable current, SMD shunt based current probe is developed for switching and steady state current measurements in wide band-gap power devices. By designing this shunt with an extremely low insertion inductance of less than 10 pH it is ensured that the measurement circuit has negligible impact on switching device operation.