GaN Gate Injection Transistor with integrated Si Schottky barrier diode for highly efficient DC-DC converters

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel GaN-based normally-off transistor with an integrated Si Schottky barrier diode (SBD) for low voltage DC-DC converters. The integrated SBD is formed by the Si substrate for the epitaxial growth of AlGaN/GaN hetero-structure, which is connected to the normally-off GaN Gate Injection Transistor (GIT) over it with via-holes. The diode can flow the reverse current in the conversion operation with lower forward voltage than that of the lateral GaN transistor enabling lower operating loss. A DC-DC converter from 12V down to 1.3V using the integrated devices with the reduced gate length down to 0.5μm exhibits a high peak efficiency of 89% at 2MHz demonstrating the promising potential of GaN devices for the application.