The ability of enhancement mode gallium nitride based power devices, such as the eGaN® FET, to achieve higher efficiencies and higher switching frequencies than possible with silicon MOSFETs has been demonstrated for a variety of applications. With improvements in switching figure of merit provided by eGaN FETs, the packaging and PCB layout parasitics are critical to high performance. This first part of this article will study the effect of parasitic inductance on performance for eGaN FET and MOSFET based point of load (POL) buck converters operating at a switching frequency of 1 MHz, an input voltage of 12 V, an output voltage of 1.2 V, and an output current up to 20 A.

By David Reusch, Ph.D., Director, Applications, Efficient Power Conversion Corporation

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