Voltage Distortion Effects in GaN-Based Dual-Inverters Caused by Deadtime and Delayed Switching

This paper investigates the most significant voltage distortion effects present in GaN-based Dual Inverter (DI) topology. Dual Inverters have emerged as promising solutions for various applications in electric drives, offering advantages such as superior DC-bus voltage utilization and multilevel operation capability. These advantages can be further enhanced when equipped with wide bandgap power devices such as GaN. However, despite the superior switching speeds of GaN devices compared to their traditional Si counterparts, they still exhibit nonlinear behavior and delayed current-dependent switching properties, resulting in distortion in the inverter output voltage, especially in high-frequency applications. Therefore, this paper aims to analyze and analytically describe the output voltage distortion arising from deadtime and delayed switching in GaN-based DIs. A simple mathematical model is proposed to accurately characterize this type of voltage distortion, which is then experimentally validated using a custom laboratory DI prototype.