Design Trends in Smart Gate Driver ICs for Power GaN HEMTs

Gallium nitride (GaN) power transistors are gaining rapid acceptance by the power electronics industry as the next generation wide bandgap (WBG) power semiconductor technology. Early direct drop-in replacement attempts of the silicon based power MOSFETs with GaN power devices either produce no significant performance improvement or even degradation in some situations. This is mainly due to the fact that the GaN power devices were not driven properly to fully exploit their true performance. In this paper, different gate driving techniques for both depletion and enhancement mode GaN power transistors are examined. In addition, the recent trends on integrated GaN pre-driver and GaN power ICs is also discussed.