Abstract
Integration is a key way to improve the switching frequency and power density for a DC-DC converter. A monolithic integrated GaN based DC-DC buck converter is realized by using a gate driver and a half-bridge power stage. The gate driver is composed of three stages (amplitude amplifier stage, level shifting stage and resistive-load amplifier stage) to amplify and modulate the driver control signal, i.e., CML (current mode logic) level of which the swing is from 1.1 to 1.8 V meaning that there is no need for an additional buffer or preamplifier for the control signal. The gate driver can provide sufficient driving capability for the power stage and improve the power density efficiently. The proposed GaN based DC-DC buck converter is implemented in the 0.25 μm depletion mode GaN-on-SiC process with a chip area of 1.7 mm × 1.3 mm, which is capable of operating at high switching frequency up to 200 MHz and possesses high power density up to 1 W/mm2 at 15 V output voltage. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the highest power density for GaN based DC-DC converter at the hundreds of megahertz range.
Highlights
The increasing requirements of power consumption, high power density and high operational frequency of modern applications have been appealing for converters with much smaller size and higher switching frequency
CB and lineline for for thethe converter with. To reduce this part DC power dissipation, this paper proposed another topology with a bootstrapped capacitor as shown in Figure 6
The designed GaN based DC-DC converter is realized in the process of 0.25 μm GaN-on-SiC and the detailed description of the process can refer to [17]
Summary
The increasing requirements of power consumption, high power density and high operational frequency of modern applications have been appealing for converters with much smaller size and higher switching frequency. Traditional DC-DC converters are mostly implemented in the process of Si MOSFET (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor) with extremely low RON (on-state resistance) and high efficiency performance over hundreds of kilohertz [2,3,4,5,6,7] they can not operate at very high switching frequency with desirable power density due to the large parasitic capacitors [8] Under such circumstances lots of efforts have been put in GaN based switching DC-DC converters [9,10] for higher operating frequency, breakdown voltage and power density performance comparing to the counterparts of Si devices [11,12].
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