Quote
uncle_bob
There's a lot of room between the near ms turn on speeds with a weak pull-up resistor and the 10's of ns you might get with an uber driver on the FET. I would not cost reduce the series gate resistor out of the design.
+1
IMHO, getting the turn of/off times below the uS region is just asking for trouble, and you'll wind up adding back any components you save on the driver side to the output side for dI/dT protection and reducing EMI. An LM339 and some discretes would be cheap and readily available, or quad comparators with push/pull outputs are about $0.50, but less generic. These could easily build a 12V gate drive circuit that would switch faster and better than driving a FET directly from the AVR I/O pin, which seems to have worked fine for the previous RAMPS.