Advantages of Using Gallium Nitride FETs in Satellite Applications
Silicon FETs have long since dominated the space and high reliability industry, but they are quickly approaching their theoretical limit of performance. To move forward, we need to look towards wide bandgap semiconductors. Gallium Nitride (GaN) FETs have several advantages, such as size, weight and efficiency, over traditional Silicon FETs. GaN FETs have shorter distances between the source and drain, which translates to a much smaller die and lower resistance (reduced conduction losses). The smaller die, thereby, leads to fewer parasitics such as output capacitance and layout inductances, which results in lower switching losses. The combination of lower switching and conduction losses enables much higher efficiencies. The more efficient a converter is, the less the power gets dissipated into heat, resulting in fewer heat sinking requirements that, thus, reduce the weight of the overall power supply. The one key trait of GaN FETs that is different from Silicon FETs is the fact that the GaN’s gate-source voltage can never exceed 6V. Most radiation hardened FET drivers on the market provide drive voltages in excess of 10V (to support Silicon FETs), which are damaging for GaN. A gate driver that can level shift the 10V+ signal down to acceptable levels for GaN would help increase the adoption rate of GaN in the space and high-reliability industry.
Despite the fact that the satellite industry tends to lag on new technology adoption, in general, this industry has been very interested in, and has already deployed, next-generation Gallium Nitride (GaN) technology for RF and switching applications. An application where GaN often hasn’t been deployed is power management, in which the advantages of GaN performance can be realized even more so. What was needed to enable this adoption has been missing up until now. With enhancement mode GaN FET availability, and now radiation-hardened ground-up designed GaN FET driver availability, GaN deployment in power management applications can be realized. Substantial improvements in board space savings and power efficiency are now possible with these products due to GaN FET best-in-class gate-charge performance and higher switching frequency capability. GaN FET performance and GaN FET driver solution details will be discussed in more detail in this paper.
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White Paper |
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Please see the document for details |
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English Chinese Chinese and English Japanese |
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February, 2018 |
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R18WP001-EU0000-FET-GATE-DRIVER |
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803 KB |
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