Hub motored Formula Student vehicles present unique requirements for inverter design, making a custom solution a viable option to achieve the necessary voltage, power and packaging requirements. This thesis presents the design of such an inverter power stage using discrete SiC transistors.

The inverter is designed for 600V and 65A RMS, for an output power of approximately 45 kV A. The resulting package of four inverters fits inside a six liter volume, resulting in a power density of 30 kVAL−1.

Choices of transistors, capacitors, gate drivers, and current sensors have been made. The design is based on Infineon 1200V SiC transistors driven by a UCC21710 gate driver from Texas Instruments. The current sensor is a MLX91208 board mounted hall effect sensor from Melexis. Comprehensive schematics and a PCB layout have been produced, including integration of advanced gate driver features such as overcurrent protection and analog sensing.

Finite Element Method (FEM) analysis has been used to evaluate the cooling performance as well as the magnetic properties of the current sensing design. A model of the layout parasitics has been made using FastHenry2 and integrated into an LTSpice model, where a custom transistor model and other elements have been used to evaluate the performance of the design.

In addition to the design itself, this thesis contributes to the field by providing details on the steps required, as well as a few simple tools, to make this simulation process more accessible and less error-prone.