By Maurizio Di Paolo Emilio, Marcom Director, and Marco Palma, Vice President of Motor Drive Marketing and System Engineering at Efficient Power Conversion, EPC
Rapid growth in industrial automation, collaborative robots, autonomous mobile robots (AMRs), drones, and precision servo systems is driving the need for a new generation of low-voltage motor drives to deliver higher efficiency, greater power density, and improved dynamic performance. In the past, silicon MOSFETs were the most common switching technology for this voltage range, but nowadays, gallium nitride (GaN) power devices enable inverter architectures that can operate at much higher switching frequencies, improving motor efficiency without the efficiency penalties traditionally associated with silicon.
Motor drive design requirements are different from data center power converters, as they must simultaneously optimize several performance parameters. In addition to efficiency, design optimization must also account for low torque ripple, low acoustic noise, high current-loop bandwidth, low electromagnetic interference (EMI), complex thermal management, and overall reduced system size. Recent 100 V GaN power stages show the possibility to simultaneously meet these objectives by carefully optimizing the power devices as well as the surrounding system architecture.
Read More – Bodo’s Power Systems, September 2026