SiC and GaN power transistors switching energy evaluation in hard and soft switching conditions

Abstract

Abstract-SiC and GaN power transistors switching energy are compared in this paper. In order to compare switching energy Esw of the same power rating device, a theoretical analysis is given to compare SiC device conduction loss and switching losses change when device maximal blocking voltage reduces by half. After that, Esw of a 650V GaN-HEMT is measured in hard switching condition and is compared with that of a 1200V SiC-MOSFET and a 650V SiC-MOSFET with the same current rating, in which it is shown that Esw of a GaN-HEMT is smaller than a 1200V SiC-MOSFET, which is smaller than 650V SiC-MOSFET. Following by that, in order to reduce device turn-ON switching energy, a zero voltage switching circuit is used to evaluate all the devices. Device output capacitance stored energy Eoss are measured and turn-OFF switching losses are obtained by subtracting Eoss, which shows that GaN-HEMT is sill better than SiC device in terms of switching losses and 1200V SiC-MOSFET has smaller switching losses than 650V SiC-MOSFET.

SiC/GaN power semiconductor devices: a theoretical comparison and experimental evaluation under different switching conditions

“…12 measured E oss of all the aforementioned devices, which shows that E oss of all the devices is close to each other. The GaN-HEMT is evaluated at 300 V in soft switching mode, which shows more experimental results than original results presented by the authors in [8]. This result confirms with device C oss values given in Fig.…”

“…1, pp. [3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11] This is an open access article published by the IET under the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)…”

“…Previous study on device losses comparison has been reported by the authors in [7, 8]. The objective of this paper is to theoretically analyse SiC devices losses change when blocking voltage reduces from 1200 to 600 V and then experimentally evaluate commercial SiC and GaN devices switching losses in different switching conditions.…”

“…The objective of this paper is to theoretically analyse SiC devices losses change when blocking voltage reduces from 1200 to 600 V and then experimentally evaluate commercial SiC and GaN devices switching losses in different switching conditions. Using soft switching technique such as zero‐voltage switching (ZVS) helps to reduce device switching losses, so all the devices are also compared under soft‐switching condition, which presents more experimental results than previous work in [7, 8].…”

Low-Dispersion, High-Voltage, Low-Leakage GaN HEMTs on Native GaN Substrates

“…GaN-based High Electron Mobility Transistors (HEMTs) are considered to be the future power semiconductor switches [5], [6] at least for voltage operation range up to 650 V. However, the higher GaN cost and poorer reliability compared to Si counterparts are two major obstacles hindering the much anticipated wide commercialization of GaN power switches [7], [8]. The cost issue is addressed by the considerable development in GaN on large area Si wafers (GaN/Si) epitaxy (up to 200mm wafer diameter), which are capable of high voltage operation with relatively low leakage current [9].…”