Gallium Nitride Applications in Power Electronics
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Abstract
For just over 50 years doped Silicon (Si) has been the dominant semiconductor material for electronic circuit design and will continue its dominance for the foreseeable future for good reason. For now, competing or complementary process technologies lack the economies of scale to drive costs down in parallel with Si. In addition to development and manufacturing costs, Si process behavior and circuit performance are well understood and consistently predictable well into the deep submicron level. Current production Si channel lengths are about 22nm and 18µm for digital and analog integrated circuit manufacturers, respectively. Other than design specific characteristics, doped Si performance suffices for the vast majority of applications today. This paper will lightly cover Gallium Nitride (GaN) properties and the applications in power electronics. Additionally, GaN will also be compared with Silicon Carbide (SiC) which has very good characteristics for power electronics but is not a III-Nitride compound.