High Current Turn-off of GaN HEMT for Solid-state Circuit Breaker at Cryogenic Temperatures

Gallium Nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) are superior for cryogenically cooled solid-state circuit breakers (SSCBs) in future aircraft applications owing to their low on-resistance and high saturation current. However, during the high current turn-off, it is found that potent...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Dong, Zhou, Yang, Ching-Hsiang, Dam, Shimul K., Qin, Dehao, Chen, Ruirui, Wang, Fred Fei, Bai, Hua, Zhang, Zheyu
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Cryogenic power electronics
electrified aircraft
Gallium nitride
GaN HEMT
HEMTs
Snubbers
solid-state circuit breaker
Stability analysis
Switches
Trajectory
Voltage
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Summary:Gallium Nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) are superior for cryogenically cooled solid-state circuit breakers (SSCBs) in future aircraft applications owing to their low on-resistance and high saturation current. However, during the high current turn-off, it is found that potential voltage and current ringing could happen to damage the device. In this paper, the turn-off failure mechanism of 650V/ 150A GaN bare dies are analyzed, which could be due to the instability of paralleled switching cells in one GaN bare die. A solution is proposed to use an RC snubber to reduce the overlap of v_{ds} and i_{d} in the turn-off process to avoid the unstable region where the hard-switching trajectory goes through. Experiments are conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed solution. With the reduced overlap between v_{ds} and i_{d} , the GaN HEMT successfully turns off the 550 A objective current.
ISSN:2470-6647
DOI:10.1109/APEC43580.2023.10131468