At the 30th IEEE Applied Power Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC 2015) in Charlotte, NC, USA (15-19 March), Transphorm Inc of Goleta, near Santa Barbara, CA, USA (which designs and provides gallium nitride-based power conversion devices and modules) - in partnership with ON Semiconductor - has announced the introduction of two co-branded 600V gallium nitride (GaN) cascode transistors and a 240W reference design that utilizes them.
This builds on the partnership announced last September between Transphorm Inc, Transphorm Japan Inc and ON Semiconductor of Phoenix, AZ, USA (which supplies silicon-based power and signal management, logic, discrete and custom devices for energy-efficient electronics) to bring GaN-based power solutions to market.
With typical on-resistances of 150mΩ and 290mΩ, the two new GaN products, TPH3202PS (ON Semi equivalent: NTP8G202N) and TPH3206PS (ON Semi equivalent: NTP8G206N), are each offered in an optimized TO-220 package for easy integration with customers' existing circuit board manufacturing capabilities.
"At last year's APEC 2014, the Transphorm booth displayed evaluation boards using our 600V TO-220 HEMTs. At this year's show we're excited to announce complete GaN-specific reference designs with ON Semiconductor," says Transphorm's president & co-founder Primit Parikh. "We have consistently demonstrated, since 2011, that our JEDEC-qualified 600V GaN products enable more efficient, compact and low-cost solutions than traditional silicon devices," he claims. "With our partner, ON Semiconductor, we are providing complete reference design platforms and tools that enable designers to take advantage of GaN's benefits while greatly accelerating their design cycles and reduce time to market."
The two-stage evaluation board NCP1397GANGEVB (Transphorm equivalent: TDPS250E2D2) is offered as a complete reference design so that customers can implement GaN cascode transistors in their power designs. The evaluation board is representative of a production power supply that has been re-designed for smaller-size and higher-performance systems, and it aims to highlight the capability and potential of GaN transistors in this power range. The boost stage delivers 98% efficiency and utilizes the NCP1654 power factor correction (PFC) controller. The LLC DC-DC stage uses the NCP1397 resonant mode controller to offer a 97% full load efficiency. This performance is achieved while running at 200+kHz and is also able to meet EN55022 Class B EMC performance. Full documentation is available at the Transphorm and ON Semiconductor websites.
Transphorm's GaN HEMT devices are in mass production at the Fujitsu Semiconductor group's CMOS-compatible 150mm wafer fab in Aizu-Wakamatsu, Fukushima, Japan. The large-scale, automotive-qualified facility, which is providing exclusive GaN foundry services for Transphorm and its partners, is intended to allow the expansion of Transphorm's GaN power device business to meet growing demand.
At APEC, Transphorm's booth 1317 and ON Semiconductor's booth 407 are providing demonstrations of the GaN devices along with a new current-mode LLC power supply and automotive motor driver.
