The platform, including the Pre-Drive™ 3 controller board, powered by the Pre-Flex™ FPGA, and the RPG gate controller board, allows you to double the output power of a typical inverter, or increase the switching speed by a factor of up to 20 times.
Hard switching is the most commonly used technique for DC/AC power converters, but it has numerous drawbacks, the biggest of which is the introduction of switching losses: the wasted energy produced while a transistor makes a complete transition between the on and off states. These switching losses are responsible for a large percentage of the power converter's losses. In contrast, soft switching minimizes switching losses, but it has never been successfully implemented in DC/AC systems with varying input voltage, temperature, and load conditions. Pre-Switch uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) to constantly adjust the relative timing of the elements within the required switching system to force a resonance that compensates for the current and voltage waveforms, thus minimizing switching losses.
Pre-Switch's forced resonance soft-switching topology replaces the traditional silicon carbide or IGBT controller with a common smart controller board, Pre-Drive3, and a dedicated RPG (Resonant Power Gate) plug-in module optimized for the customer's chosen SiC or IGBT package. The Pre-Switch architecture offers the same or better switching loss performance than a five-level design, but significantly reduces cost, control complexity, and the number of bills of materials (BOMs).
