GaN FET Characterization
Capstone Project

Context

Towards the end of their degrees, Engineering Physics students participate in multifaceted capstone projects, meant to serves as culminating academic and intellectual experiences showcasing the knowledge students have gained through school and internships up to that point.

Our group of 5 worked on a project sponsored by UBC ECE professor William Dunford, SFU ECE professor Patrick Palmer and a UBC ECE PHD graduate Ahmed Sherwali. The aim of our project was to characterize Power GaN FETs under hard switching for eventual use in a 1MHz 650V optical-fiber-driven high-side-isolated H-bridge. High-power high-efficiency H-bridges circuits have applications everywhere, including electric cars, induction heaters (our application), and more, and GaN devices are a novel technology which will push them to the next level.

For our project, we designed a double pulse test board to enable us to make measurements of key GaN FETs parameters such as a turn on time, power loss, and gate ringing during high voltage hard switching. Special attention had to be made to ensure our measurement circuits had large enough bandwidth to measure the fastest transients, signal integrity of our measurement signals was maintained, and both power and signals were properly isolated where required to avoid unwanted magnetic coupling.

Please read more about our project in our final report here for a deeper technical dive into our project.