Short-Circuit Capability with GaN HEMTs : Invited

Short-circuit capability with GaN HEMTs is demonstrated thanks to an integrated Short-Circuit Current Limiter (SCCL) and a commercial gate-driver with DESAT protection. The SCCL is applied to GaN HEMTs to achieve a sufficiently long short-circuit withstanding time (SCWT) while retaining competitive on-state resistance. The SCWT is tuned from 0.3 μs to 3 μs (a remarkable 10x increase) with a relatively small penalty in on-resistance, no leakage increase, no threshold voltage degradation and no reliability degradation. The gate-driver has desaturation detection (DESAT) and soft shutdown circuitry to achieve a fast protection response of 800 ns with high noise immunity greater than 100 V/ns. The combination of GaN power devices with SCCL and a commercial gate driver with fast DESAT and high noise immunity allows short-circuit protection and fail-safe operation of GaN power electronics for additional robustness in motor drive applications.