Gate drive design considerations for high voltage cascode GaN HEMT

Author

Wei Zhang ; Xiucheng Huang ; Lee, Fred C. ; Qiang Li

Author_Institution

Bradley Dept. of Electr. & Comput. Eng., Center for Power Electron. Syst. - CPES, Blacksburg, VA, USA

fYear

2014

fDate

16-20 March 2014

Firstpage

1484

Lastpage

1489

Abstract

This paper investigates gate drive design for high voltage gallium nitride (GaN) high electron-mobility transistors (HEMT) in a cascade structure. High dv/dt and di/dt switching characteristics of GaN device and its influences on high-side gate drive are analyzed on an 8.4kW bidirectional multi-channel buck/boost battery charger operating in critical conduction mode (CRM). Driving candidates for high-side gate drive are reviewed, and digital isolator based driving architecture is proposed with discussion of PCB layout and package parasitics. Experimental results are conducted in each step for concepts validation.

Keywords

battery chargers; gallium compounds; high electron mobility transistors; CRM; HEMT; PCB layout; bidirectional multichannel buck/boost battery charger; cascade structure; critical conduction mode; digital isolator; driving architecture; gate drive design considerations; high electron-mobility transistors; high voltage gallium nitride; package parasitics; Drives; Gallium nitride; Isolators; Layout; Logic gates; Silicon; Switches;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC), 2014 Twenty-Ninth Annual IEEE

Conference_Location

Fort Worth, TX

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/APEC.2014.6803503

Filename

6803503