Best design practices utilize the advantages offered by eGaN FETs, including printed circuit board (PCB) layout and thermal management. As GaN transistor switching charges continue to decrease, system parasitics must also be reduced to achieve maximum switching speeds and minimize parasitic ringing typical of power converters.

Power Electronics
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Optimizing PCB layout for an eGaN FET based point of load (POL) buck converter will reduce parasitics, thus leading to improved efficiency, faster switching speeds, and reduced device voltage overshoot compared to conventional MOSFET based designs.

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

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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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Initial shoot-out articles showed that eGaN^® FETs behave similarly to silicon devices and can be evaluated using the same performance metrics. Although eGaN FETs perform significantly better by most metrics, the eGaN FET ‘body-diode’ forward voltage is higher than its MOSFET counterpart and can be a significant loss component during dead-time. Body diode forward conduction losses alone do not make up all dead-time dependent losses. Diode reverse-recovery and output capacitance losses are also important. In this article, we discuss dead-time management and the need to minimize all dead-time losses.

By Johan Strydom, Ph.D., Vice President of Applications, EPC Power Electronics Technology

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