A monolithic GaN driver with a deadtime generator (DTG) for high-temperature (HT) GaN DC-DC buck converters

This paper presents a monolithic GaN driver with a deadtime generator (DTG) for half-bridge DC-DC buck converters. The proposed GaN integrated circuits (ICs) were fabricated in a 3 µm enhancement-mode GaN MIS-HEMTs process. The integrated DTG converter can operate at 250°C with a large gate swing of 10 V, and it exhibits a maximum efficiency of 80% at high temperatures, with V_IN= 30 V at 100 kHz. The monolithic GaN DTG driver requires one control signal and generates a deadtime of fewer than 0.13 µs at high temperatures up to 250°C. The proposed DTG converter is compared to an integrated GaN converter without DTG (w/o) under various conditions. At high temperatures, the optimized GaN DTG converter shows better performance than the GaN converter w/o at high load currents, in terms of smaller voltage overshoots and better efficiency as well. This work demonstrates a simple GaN deadtime method for high temperature (HT) GaN power converters.