| Abstract |
The aim of this work is to investigate the impact of the PCB (Printed Circuit Board) electrical parasitic parameters on the performances of a SiC Three-Level T-type rectifier used for electric vehicle battery chargers. The short switching times of the SiC devices enables high switching frequency at very high efficiency. On the other hand, as the time derivative of the current increases (as a rule of thumb we can set 1A/ns as a breaking point), PCB parasitics start to play a significant role and may cause the degradation of the performances or even a design failure, if not taken into account right from the first design stage. Industry standard EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools can be used to extract a model for the PCB to evaluate all the unwanted effects introduced by the physical realization of the board layout. For the scope of the current study, the software Advanced Design System, ADS by Keysight Technologies has been used to extract an S-parameter based model of the PCB and co-simulate it with the circuit components. Results obtained with and without the PCB model are finally compared for two different design iterations. |
