Applications of Gallium Nitride in power electronics

The electrical properties of Gallium Nitride (GaN) offer several advantages over Silicon (Si) for creating switching devices for power electronics. Already this emerging technology is showing improvements in power density and efficiency in certain applications. The following paper reviews the current state of the art of GaN devices. It discusses challenges in implementation, such as the mistriggers that result from dV/dt´s across the miller capacitance. It examines third quadrant operation for negative gate to source voltages. A strategy for mounting devices from Efficient Power Conversion is provided. Finally, two switched capacitor circuits are presented with experimental results. The first is a voltage doubler operating at 893 kHz with a peak power of 480 W and an efficiency of 94.4 %. The second is a three-phase, three-level inverter with preliminary test results operating at 300 kHz.