Short-Circuit Protection for GaN Power Devices with Integrated Current Limiter and Commercial Gate Driver
Davide Bisi, Long H. Nguyen, Philip Zuk, Ashish Gokhale, Keith Coffey, Ted Liu, Bill Cruse, Tsutomu Hosoda, Masamichi Kamiyama, P. Parikh, Umesh K. Mishra
Abstract
A successful short-circuit protection technology for GaN power devices paired with a commercial gate driver is demonstrated. The GaN power devices have an integrated Short-Circuit Current Limiter (SCCL) to achieve a sufficiently long short-circuit withstanding time (SCWT). The SCWT is tuned from 0.3 µs to 2 µs (a remarkable 7x increase) with a relatively small penalty in on-resistance. 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.