GaN HEMT with Current-Driven Gate and its Driving Circuit Design

There are two gate configurations, i.e. voltage-driven and current-driven, of GaN HEMT in power electronics industry. The characteristics of the two configurations are discussed in the paper, current-driven configuration is more robust and reliable compared to its counterpart based on the analysis. The gate current requirements of the current-driven GaN transistor are depicted and simple but reliable gate driving circuits are recommended in the paper. Since the fast turn on/off speed of GaN transistors and unsymmetrical PCB layouts the oscillations between GaN transistors in parallel are unavoidable, the design of gate driving circuit when GaN transistors working in parallel is critical for the reliability of the whole system, the paper provides the guidelines and solutions for gate driving circuits of GaN transistors working in parallel.