The very low on-state resistance, the voltagecontrolledgate, and the relative simplicity of fabrication of thenormally-ON silicon carbide junction field effect transistor makethis device the most important player among all state-of-theartsilicon carbide transistors. However, the normally-ON naturecounts as the main factor which keeps this device far frombeing considered as an alternative to the silicon insulated-gatebipolar transistor. A self-powered gate driver without externalpower supply for normally-ON silicon carbide junction field effecttransistors is presented in this paper. The proposed circuit isable to handle the shoot-through current when the devices aresubjected to the dc-link voltage by utilizing the energy associatedwith this current. On the other hand it supplies the necessarynegative gate-source voltage during the steady-state operation. Adetailed description of the operating states of the proposed circuitalong with various design considerations are presented. Fromexperiments which were performed in a half-bridge converter, itis shown that the shoot-through current can be turned off withinapproximately 15 s. Moreover, it is shown that the proposedgate driver can properly switch the devices.