Current Status and Future Prospects of GaN Power Devices
Significant research into GaN as materials for semiconductor devices has been carried out during the last
20 years. GaN material has wide band gap energy which enables the devices to operate at elevated temperatures (600°C)
while retaining low leakage current. The higher breakdown strength for a given blocking voltage of GaN results in small
channel lengths as a result, the input and output capacitance and, therefore, the associated switching losses at a given
switching frequency, are reduced. This leads to an increase of the switching frequency to 0.5-1 MHz with acceptable
switching losses, which significantly reduces the size and cost of the passive components in power electronic systems.
While Si and SiC power MOSFETs are normally-OFF enhancement mode vertical devices, GaN HEMTs are lateral and
they can be fabricated to be normally-OFF enhancement mode devices or normally-ON depletion mode devices. A
normally-ON device is not preferred for high power applications. Designers overcome this problem by creating
enhancement mode devices or by integrating a depletion mode HEMT with a low voltage Si MOSFET, and create cascode
or direct drive devices. In this special session, the current status and future prospects of GaN Power HEMTs will be
presented. Physics and figure of merits (FoMs) of different power GaN devices that can be found on the market will be
presented. Devices from GaN systems (enhancement mode), Transphorm (cascade), VisiC and Texas Instrument (direct
drive), Panasonic (GiT), ST (MasterGaN®), and Navitas Semiconductor (AllGaN™) will be compared.
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- Ottawa, Ontario
- Canada