December 18, 2020
CEA-Leti Papers at IEDM 2020 Highlight Progress in Overcoming Challenges to Making GaN Energy-Saving, Power-Electronics Devices
Gallium Nitride Seen as Highly Efficient Replacement for Silicon In Wide Range of Consumer and Industrial Uses
GRENOBLE, France – Dec. 16, 2020 – Two complementary research papers from CEA-Leti confirmed that the institute’s approach to gallium-nitride (GaN) technologies is on track overcome challenges in the architecture and performance of advanced GaN devices embedding a MOS gate, and targeting the fast-growing global market for power-conversion systems.
In papers presented at IEDM 2020, scientists recounted experiments with variations of high-electron- mobility transistors (HEMT) based on gallium nitride-on-silicon (GaN-on-Si), called GaN-on-Si HEMT. GaN-based semiconductors improve both performance and reliability of increasingly compact power converters compared to silicon, and AIGaN/GaN HEMTs have shown potential to replace power-conversion solutions based on Si or SiC for high-frequency applications with high power and low noise. This technology is therefore expected to be a cost-effective, power-conversion solution for many end-user applications, ranging from smartphones to kitchen appliances and e-vehicles and from battery loaders to DC/DC or AC/DC converters.