Extremely High-Power GaN Devices

摘要

Most GaN devices commercially available in the market today have either 28 or 50 Ⅴ operating voltages. The 28 Ⅴ devices are more common, but several manufacturers offer 50 Ⅴ devices for even higher power circuits. The 50 Ⅴ devices seem to be about the limit at which most GaN device processes can support today in order to provide long-term, reliable operation. However, a few companies have been working on much higher operating voltage GaN devices for extremely high-power applications and are pursuing better thermal solutions in conjunction with these efforts. I reached out to several companies for some examples of their work with 65+ Ⅴ devices and received inputs from Integra Technologies and Qorvo, which are summarized here, along with an overview of some of the thermal solutions I have seen in the market Many aerospace and defense radar, SATCOM and industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) systems require highly reliable, rugged components with RF output power levels of several kilowatts. These systems have historically relied on vacuum electron devices (VED) such as traveling wave tubes (TWT) to generate multi-kW power levels. To ad- dress the increasing complexity and cost of VED based systems, semiconductor-based, solid-state power amplifiers (SSPA) have overtaken lower frequency and lower power applications, first with silicon LDMOS, then GaAs and now GaN. However, the high-power market is still predominantly addressed with VEDs.