Short-Circuit Study of Medium Voltage GaN Cascodes, P-GaN HEMTs and MISHEMTs

This paper studies by experimentation and physics-based simulation the Short-Circuit (SC) capability of several normally-off 600-650 V Gallium Nitride High-Electron-Mobility Transistors (GaN HEMTs): cascodes, p-GaN, and GaN Metal-Insulator-Semiconductor HEMTs (MISHEMTs). As a result, cascodes present the worst SC ruggedness. By contrast, p-GaN gate HEMTs and MISHEMTs provide a higher SC capability thanks to their strong drain current reduction. In addition, a valuable state-of-the-art about all commercially available technologies is also provided, which demonstrates that current GaN devices do not allow SC capability.
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics, 64 (11), pp. 9012-9022 (2017).