A high-speed low side GaN e-HEMT driver with gate ringing and overshoot suppression

Abstract

A new circuit architecture to drive GaN e-HEMT power device was proposed in this work, which was taped out on TSMC 0.18um BCD process and successfully tested. With the proposed driver circuit, gate voltage overshoot as well as ringing on GaN e-HEMT device has been successfully suppressed, while not sacrificing GaN e-HEMT advantage of high switching speed. The proposed GaN driver realized 1.1ns rising time, 910ps falling time, and minimum 1.8ns output pulse width with almost no gate ringing and overshoot. This technology could potentially improve the system stability and reliability when driving GaN e-HEMT power devices.