Experimental Comparison of GaN-Fet Based Motor Drives for High Switching Frequencies

As a new semiconductor switch, GaN-Fet provides a high switching frequency so that total harmonic distortion (THD) can be reduced in addition to rotor loss and noise level in motor drive applications. In this study, a GaN-FET based three phases inverter design is analyzed for an induction motor. The space vector PWM (SVPWM) method is used for two high switching frequencies, 50 kHz and 100 kHz. To implement this high-frequency application, a real-time system is designed with TI-BoostXL three phases GaN-Inverter and a low-cost microprocessor, STM32F407-VG is used. The system is modeled in MATLAB/Simulink environment. The embedded control algorithm is designed with STM32-Cube and Keil-MDK software with Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) and digital signal processing (DSP) libraries with floating-point unit (FPU).