Performance Evaluation of Gallium Nitride Transistors in Electronic Power Conditioner

Abstract

This work presents the performance evaluation of a Gallium Nitride (GaN) device for an Electronic Power Conditioner (EPC) that is basically used for powering up amplifiers for satellite and communication systems. From decades silicon (Si) based MOSFETs have been employed for converters used in high and medium-switched mode power supplies. Since Si devices have reached their theoretical device limitation, GaN provides a quite suitable alternative to these devices. In this work, initially, the performance of the basic converters has been verified for GaN devices in comparison with Si devices, and then after simple validation, the focus has been shifted to a much more advanced converter like Phase Shift Full Bridge Converter (PSFBC) which is the main component in most of the EPCs. Moreover, there has been discussion in detail about the thermal performance of the GaN device when it is implemented on a Printed Circuit Board (PCB).