Introduction
During my study at University of Canterbury, in Christchurch NZ, I worked on a cascaded H-Bridge design intended for high voltage high frequency arbitrary waveform generation.
This project lead me to develop a small breakout board which allowed me to test the preformance of a single stage H-Bridge. The design is based around the National semiconductor LM5104 half bridge gate driver, and contains a diode on the output to further speed the turn off time of the MOSFETs.
The dead time for the LM5104 device is set with an external resistor with the International rectifier IR120 MOSFETS I found a value of 2.2k seems to work well for a good trade off of switching speed with but negilable shoot through problems.
The board does not have heatsinking however I found this is not needed if output current is kept below 1A.
The input voltage can be up to 100V provided the decoupling capacitors on the reverse of the PCB are selected correctly. In addition the board will directly accept TTL logic levels without the need for any external level shifting.
Images
Top view of the PCB showing the combination of SMD and though hole assembly the underside just contains power and ground planes and SMD decoupling capacitors. The blue wires is a missing track in the board and has been corrected in the attachment below.