At the 39th annual Government Microcircuit Applications and Critical Technology (GOMACTech 2014) conference in Charleston, SC, USA (3 April), Alex Lidow, CEO & co-founder of Efficient Power Conversion Corp (EPC) of El Segundo, CA, USA, which makes enhancement-mode gallium nitride on silicon (eGaN) power field-effect transistors (FETs) for power management applications, will present results of a newly released family of eGaN high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) designed for high-frequency operation in the 10MHz range. The presentation will also highlight the stability of the devices under radiation exposure, making them suitable for high-reliability applications.
Enhancement-mode GaN transistors have been commercially available since 2010. They have since enabled significant efficiency improvement in commercial DC-DC converters in a variety of topologies and at a variety of power levels. E-mode transistors have also demonstrated tolerance to gamma radiation and single event effects (SEE). Compared with radiation-tolerant power MOSFETs, GaN FETs offer improvements of up to a 40-fold in key switching performance figures of merits, says EPC. This enables designers of space-level power supplies to achieve the efficiencies of commercial state-of-the-art systems, the firm adds.
“These GaN-on-silicon power transistors, designed for multi-megahertz switching converter applications, allow the designer of radiation-tolerant systems to achieve power densities and efficiencies that equal the commercial state-of-the-art,” says Lidow.
