Gallium Nitride (GaN) is a next-generation ‘wide-bandgap’ semiconductor, replacing legacy silicon chips in power electronic systems. To maximize the full potential of GaN's superior performance traits, Navitas monolithically integrates power, drive, and control to enable up to 3 times faster charging and 3 times more power in half the size and weight for mobile fast chargers, consumer electronics, solar, data centers and electric vehicles. Integration is key with GaN power devices due to their extremely high switching speeds and sensitive gate characteristics. The next generation of GaN power ICs enable even higher efficiency, autonomy, and reliability with precision sensing of system current, voltage and temperature with real-time control and protection. Implementing integrated loss-less current sensing, external monitoring components such as large, lossy sense resistors are eliminated, reducing system power loss, complexity and system cost. Offering GaN's superior performance and switching speed alongside the highest level of protection and sensing, GaN power ICs can be confidently used in higher power applications with stringent regulations for efficiency and reliability, such as solar inverters, motor drives, server power, EV Onboard Chargers (OBC) and DC-DC systems.

Gallium Nitride power integrated circuits are ramping into high volume and showing unprecedented efficiency, density, and system cost advantages. The technology delivers a complement of scalable devices with models, and a full suite of verification tools. Innovative circuit designs enable complex functions without the benefit of CMOS, bipolars, or diodes.

A 3.2KW 240VAC-to-48VDC high-density rectifier has been designed, built and tested. The topology selected includes an interleaved totem-pole power factor correction (PFC) front end, a resonant LLC step down converter, and a synchronous rectification (SR) output stage. The power train consists of GaN Power ICs with integrated gate drive operating at frequencies of 1MHz and has enabled an overall power density target of 70 W/in3. The GaN power IC waveforms demonstrate clean and fast zero-voltage operation in all stages and the prototype has reached peak efficiencies of 99% in the PFC stage and 98.3% in the LLC/SR stage.

Gallium nitride (GaN) is a compound semiconductor that has tremendous potential to facilitate economic growth in a semiconductor industry that is silicon-based and currently faced with diminishing returns of performance versus cost of investment. At a material level, its high electric field strength and electron mobility have already shown tremendous potential for high frequency communications and photonic applications. Advances in growth on commercially viable large area substrates are now at the point where power conversion applications of GaN are at the cusp of commercialisation. The future for building on the work described here in ways driven by specific challenges emerging from entirely new markets and applications is very exciting. This collection of GaN technology developments is therefore not itself a road map but a valuable collection of global state-of-the-art GaN research that will inform the next phase of the technology as market driven requirements evolve. First generation production devices are igniting large new markets and applications that can only be achieved using the advantages of higher speed, low specific resistivity and low saturation switching transistors. Major investments are being made by industrial companies in a wide variety of markets exploring the use of the technology in new circuit topologies, packaging solutions and system architectures that are required to achieve and optimise the system advantages offered by GaN transistors. It is this momentum that will drive priorities for the next stages of device research gathered here.

Gallium Nitride is an emerging technology that is enabling major advances in power electronics. Power integrated circuits are now emerging in the market and showing unprecedented efficiency, density, and system cost advantages. This paper reviews the beginnings of power integrated circuit techniques, leading to present implementations in advanced IC products, and forecasts future directions for the new technology.

The 2016 IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference featured more than 100 papers [1] based on gallium nitride (GaN) power components up to 650 V, yet market adoption of GaN in off-line alternating current (ac) or 400 V direct current (dc) input converters has been slow. This article explores the physical material advantages of GaN versus silicon (Si) and compares early cascode GaN approaches in te...