hi to everyone. I mysteriously killed 5 MOSFET half bridge drivers and wish to see if anyone can help.
I'm making a N-MOSFET H bridge circuit that switch a sine wave output using unipolar PWM for an inverter project. The gate driver I choose was IR21834 and I began testing half of the bridge on breadboard according to the datasheet circuit. Connecting input lines manually to V+ or GND to produce the output, the lower MOSFET would first work, but it always happened that somehow after changing the circuit such as connecting driver input here and there or switching the value of boostrap capacitor, at a random time the chip would go crazy . The chip would feel hot touch, followed by increase in current drawn, all of which signifying an internal short circuit. It seems the hide side circuit is causing problem, since the low side output would usually still functioning afterwards.
I believe such short circuit behavior can only be caused by shorting high side output to ground or to V+, and I swear I didn't, nor did I connect bootstrap diode and capacitor wrongly (I redid the circuit several times and same error can't happen over and over again). I thought it might be chip design problem but as I tried chip from other manufacture, L6388 from ST, the same happened. Now I'm really threatened as I don't want to kill any more chips. Although I might find out the reason myself but that would probably take another 10 chips dedicated to destroy, and this is why I ask for help here.
While not expecting a direct reason to the problem, I am REALLY REALLY glad if someone who have killed MOSFET driver before (for whatever reasons) to share his/her story, and also tell me what to avoid when working with drivers, thousands thanks in advance!