Impact of Parasitic Capacitor to the GaN HEMT Devices

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to evaluate the impact of the parasitic capacitor to the Gallium-Nitride (GaN) based high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT). Because of the high switching frequency operation, the parasitic inductor has caught a lot of attention when the GaN HEMT is applied in the high power applications. However, the impact of parasitic capacitor to the GaN HEMT is not discussed in literatures. A prototype circuit is built and tested to evaluate the impacts of parasitic capacitor to the GaN HEMT performance. The results show that the parasitic capacitor can induce voltage spike and damage the GaN HEMT.