ST offers 45W and 150W MasterGaN products for energy efficient power conversion applications

     To facilitate the transition to energy-efficient wide-bandgap semiconductor technology, ST has released the MasterGaN3 and MasterGaN5 integrated power system packages for power conversion applications up to 45W and 150W, respectively. Together with MasterGaN1, MasterGaN2 and MasterGaN4 for 65W to 400W applications, These two new products give engineers designing switching power supplies, chargers, adapters, high-voltage power factor correction (PFC) and DC/DC converters more flexibility in selecting the right gallium nitride (GaN) device and drive solution.

     St's MasterGaN concept simplifies the development of GaN wide band gap power technology to replace common silicon-based MOSFETs. The new product integrates two 650V power transistors with optimized high voltage gate drivers and associated safety protection circuits, eliminating gate driver and circuit layout design challenges. Because GaN transistors can achieve higher switching frequencies, the new integrated power system package enables power supply sizes to be 80% smaller than silicon-based designs with high robustness and reliability.

     MasterGaN3's two GaN power transistors have unequal on-going resistance values (Rds(on) of 225mΩ and 450mΩ, respectively, making them suitable for soft switching and active rectifier converters. In MasterGaN5, both transistors have on-going resistance values (Rds(on)) of 450mΩ, suitable for topologies such as LLC resonators and active clamp flyback converters.

     Like other members of the MasterGaN product family, both devices have inputs compatible with 3.3V to 15V logic signals, simplifying the connection of the product itself to primary controllers such as DSP processors, FPgas or microcontrollers, and external devices such as Hall sensors. The new product also incorporates safety protection features, including high-low side undervoltage lock (UVLO), gate driver interlock, overheat protection, and turn-off pins.

     Each MasterGaN product comes with a dedicated prototype development board to help designers quickly start new power projects. Both the EVALMASTERGAN3 and EVALMASTERGAN5 development boards contain a single-ended or complementary driver signal generator circuit. An on-board tunable dead-time generator, along with associated device interfaces, allows users to use different input signals or PWM signals, connect an external bootup diode to improve capacitive loads, and insert a low boundary galvanometer resistance for peaking topologies.