Gate and Power Drivers

Gate and power drivers are simply buffers, either inverting or non-inverting, which are used to drive high power transistors.  Typically these transistors are placed in an H bridge configuration, which has two pull-up devices and two pull down devices.  A single gate and power driver may have outputs for driving all four of these devices, half of them, or just one.  These types of drivers may have other features built in such as level shifting, shoot-through prevention, slew rate adjustment, over-voltage/over-temp detection, output disable and noise filtering.  Using an integrated power driver chip can significantly reduce the component count for a design.  Choosing the right driver for a design requires careful consideration of the requirements of the system and the type of load that is being driven.