Do you want to develop a compact switch-mode power supply (SMPS)? Then a gallium nitride (GaN) based FET is a better choice compared to a silicon based FET due to its higher power density, smaller gate charge and faster switching speed.
This article discuses about TIDA-01634, a SMPS refence design for from Texas Instruments. TIDA-01634 is a compact SMPS which uses a GaN power HEMTs and the LMG1210 GaN half-bridge driver to realize a multi-MHz power stage with high efficiency. The high switching frequency of up to 50MHz allows it to have a very fast response rate making it suitable for application such as in 5G telecom power, industrial power supplies, server, etc.
GaN and high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) offers no recovery loss, smaller gate charge, faster switching, and exhibit a lower figure of merit. The use of half-bridge driver allows it single PWM input with configurable dead time or two independent inputs for high-side and low-side gate drive. Dead-time adjustment can be realized with two resistors for low-to-high and high-to-low transition settings from 0 ns to 20 ns. The design can work for extended period of time due to low thermal dissipation and also the bootstrap switching action prevents overvoltage of high-side gate due to large third quadrant voltage drop of GaN HEMTs.
Block diagram of the SMPS
Efficiency of the Design
The design has a high efficiency of up to 97%, image below shows the efficiency of the SMPS when the power stage is running at 10 MHz with a 85% duty cycle with respect to different output current.
Design Resources
TI has shared all the resources such as application notes, gerber files, PCB layout, etc for this reference design to simplify the designing process. All the shared resources can be accessed by clicking on this link.
