N. Badawi¹, O. Hilt², E. Bahat-Treidel², J. Böcker¹, J. Würfl², and S. Dieckerhoff¹

Published in:

IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. 52, no. 6, pp. 4955-4964 (2016).

Abstract:

In this paper, current collapse phenomena and thermal effects in normally-off and normally-on GaN HEMTs are investigated. The experimental results show that a high-off-state voltage and high-switched drain current at high junction temperature cause an increase of the on-state resistance R_DSON. Varying the switching frequency from 50 to 400 kHz, an increase of the on-state resistance is further observed for both types of GaN devices. It is evident from these experiments that the number of switching transients significantly influences the increase of the R_DSON, suggesting that this increase is due to a current collapse in GaN HEMTs. A detailed comparison of the evaluated R_DSON between GaN transistors and the high-speed CoolMOS-C7 transistor is presented.

Index Terms:

Dynamic R_DSON, Gallium Nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility transistor (HEMT), trapping effect.

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