Building on decades of power-management innovation, Texas Instruments (TI) announced the availability of 600-V gallium nitride (GaN) 70-mΩ field-effect transistor (FET) power-stage engineering samples, making TI the first and only semiconductor manufacturer to publicly offer a high-voltage driver-integrated GaN solution.
The new 12-A LMG3410 power stage coupled with TI's analog and digital power-conversion controllers enables designers to create smaller, more efficient and higher-performing designs compared to silicon FET-based solutions. These benefits are especially important in isolated high-voltage industrial, telecom, enterprise computing and renewable energy applications.
"With over 3 million hours of reliability testing, the LMG3410 gives power designers the confidence to realize the potential of GaN and to rethink their power architecture and systems in ways not feasible before," said Steve Lambouses, TI vice president of high-voltage power solutions. "Expanding on TI's reputation for manufacturing capability and extensive system-design expertise, the new power stage is a significant step for the GaN market."
With its integrated driver and features such as zero reverse-recovery current, the LMG3410 provides reliable performance, especially in hard-switching applications where it can dramatically reduce switching losses by as much as 80 percent. Unlike stand-alone GaN FETs, the easy-to-use LMG3410 integrates built-in intelligence for temperature, current and undervoltage lockout (UVLO) fault protection.
The LMG3410 is the first semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) to include GaN FETs manufactured by TI. Building on years of expertise in manufacturing and process technologies, TI creates its GaN devices in a silicon-compatible factory and qualifies them with practices that are beyond the typical Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) standards to ensure the reliability and robustness of GaN for demanding use cases. Easy-to-use packaging will help increase the adoption of GaN power designs in applications such as power factor controller (PFC) AC/DC converters, high-voltage DC bus converters and photovoltaic (PV) inverters.
