Transphorm showcasing new automotive-grade AEC-Q101-qualified GaN FET for PHEVs and EVs
01 May 2017
Transphorm Inc. is showcasing its recently announced second-generation, AEC-Q101 qualified GaN FET—the industry’s first automotive-grade GaN technology—at the 2017 Power Conversion and Intelligent Motion (PCIM) Europe expo.
Transphorm’s automotive GaN FET, the TPH3205WSBQA, offers an on-resistance of 49 milliOhms (mΩ) in an industry standard TO-247 package. The part initially targets on-board charger (OBC) and DC to DC systems for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) and battery electric vehicles (BEV).
Today, OBCs are uni-directional (AC to DC) using standard boost topologies. However, being that GaN FETs are bi-directional by nature, they become the perfect fit for the bridgeless totem-pole power factor correction (PFC) topology. A bi-directional OBC can then be designed with GaN to reduce the number of silicon (Si) devices, weight and overall system cost of today’s solution.
When compared to incumbent tech such as superjunction MOSFETs, IGBTs and Silicon Carbide (SiC), Transphorm’s GaN attributes include:
Up to 40% greater power density
Increased efficiency
Lower thermal budget
Reduced system weight
Up to 20% decrease in overall system cost
High volume manufacturing with 6-inch GaN-on-Silicon
It took a bunch of digging to find the data sheet on this:
http://www.transphormusa.com/document/650v-aec-q101-cascode-gan-fet-tph3205wsbqa/
Max drain-source voltage is 650 V continuous. This isn't even twice the peak-to-peak voltage of a 240 VAC line, so either two of them will be required in series (doubling resistance losses) or the charger and its related systems will have to "float" rather than being grounded.
Posted by: Engineer-Poet | 01 May 2017 at 08:53 AM