Multi‐resonant gate drive circuit of isolating‐gate GaN HEMTs for tens of MHz

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Research of power supplies for megahertz (MHz) class applications such as a semiconductor manufacturing apparatus, induction heater and wireless transfer is carried out. A liner amplifier is generally used for MHz class applications. The loss of the power devices on a liner amplifier is theoretically high. To reduce the loss, the class E and Φ 2 inverters are proposed, and some of the resonant gate drive circuits (GDC) are utilised at those of the gate port. However, the control signal of the GDC becomes complicated due to the additional switches. Moreover, the switches in the GDC perform the hard-switching, and the drive loss can thus be increased. In this study, a multi-resonant gate drive circuit is proposed, and its design method is introduced. It can generate the trapezoidal wave gate-to-source voltage with the simple control signal, and zero voltage switching operation is achieved at the switches of the gate drive circuit. First, its operation is experimentally verified. Secondly, the drive loss is also compared with that of the conventional circuit. Furthermore, its operation with the class E inverter with a cascode GaN high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT) is confirmed at the switching frequency 13.56 MHz.