First 1700 V GaN takes on SiC for industrial auxilliary supplies
Power Integrations has developed 1700V gallium nitride (GaN) technology to provide auxiliary power from 1000V industrial systems.
The 1700V GaN InnoMux-2 switcher has an efficiency above 90 percent even at low load from a 1000 VDC bus, supplying up to 100W from three accurately regulated outputs. This reduces the complexity of auxiliary power supply designs for meters and monitors. Each output is regulated within one percent accuracy, eliminating post regulators and further improving system efficiency by approximately ten percent.
“The industry is still struggling to get to 1200. We’ve been at 1250 for a couple of years now and now we’ve reached 1700V,” said Andy Smith, director of training at PI. “We are putting this into our InnoMux engine switcher IC for flyback and auxiliary power supplies. It has very accurate output regulation and that helps us increase the efficiency of multi-output power supplies.”
The company has silicon carbide transistors in InnoMux-2 family, and will offer both technologies. “We have 1700V SiC in the InnoSwitch family, but the processing cost for SiC is high. For the first time we are now offering a significant cost advantage over SiC as a real alternative at the same voltage,” he said. “We are going to keep the 1700V SiC parts as we have customers that use it and like it but we will be rolling out 1700V PowiGaN in more parts.”
The switchers are in a new package to provide sufficient clearance for the higher voltages. “With the 1700V devices at 1200V we had to redesign the package on the primary side to give more creepage,” said Smith.
The power consumption is under 50mW with no load input and the slew rates are all managed internally, so the switching rates of up to 150kHz are handled internally.
“The reason we are limited in the power is the thermal dissipation of the package as we use PCB cooling, that what’s setting the power limits,” he said. “We are probably looking to around 200W as the top of the range for the package.
“1700 V rating is substantially higher than any other commercially available GaN HEMT that we are aware of,” said Ezgi Dogmus, activity manager, compound semiconductors at Yole Group. “The Power GaN device market is poised to reach $2 billion by decade’s end, expanding across various application spaces with potentially attractive cost advantages over SiC.”
Pricing for InnoMux-2 1700 V ICs starts at $4.90 for 10,000-unit quantities. A reference design, RDR-1053, which describes a 60 W dual-output (5 V and 24 V) power supply, can be downloaded from the Power Integrations website at no cost.
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