Design of an Active Gate Driver IC for E-Mode GaN HEMTs Based on Adaptive Phased Regulation

This paper proposes an active gate driver IC design for enhancement-mode gallium nitride high-electron-mobility transistors (GaN HEMTs), specifically addressing the false turn-on issue induced by cross-talk between bridge arms in high-frequency switching applications. To tackle this challenge, two innovative techniques are introduced: an adaptive drain-source voltage slew rate(dV<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DS</inf>/dt) regulation method and a negative voltage self-recovery scheme. The former dynamically adjusts the gate-source voltage(V<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">GS</inf>) to align with the dV<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DS</inf> /dt variation, effectively reducing the dV<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">DS</inf> /dt from 244 V/ns to 124 V/ns, thereby suppressing cross-talk effects. The latter applies a negative voltage to the lower switch during the upper switch’s turn-on transient to block forward cross-talk and automatically restores a zero-voltage state after the upper switch is fully activated, achieving a 104.1 ps reduction in turn-on propagation delay. The proposed design provides an effective solution to enhance the reliability and performance of GaN power devices in high-frequency applications.