Dynamic on-state resistance evaluation of GaN devices under hard and soft switching conditions

Abstract

Dynamic on-state resistance (R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dson</sub> ) of two commercial 600V/650V GaN power devices under hard and soft switching conditions are extracted and compared. In addition to standard double-pulse tester (DPT), a triangular current mode (TCM) soft switching circuit is built to simulate the actual applications including double-pulse and multi-pulse operating modes. The comparison between hard and soft switching conditions reveals that the devices with different internal structures exhibit significantly different dependence on the off-state voltage and frequency under hard and soft switching conditions, which should be taken fully into account for converter design and loss estimation. To avoid misestimation, a multi-pulse measurement need to be taken into considerations when evaluating R <sub xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">dson</sub> of GaN devices.