A High-Efficiency Dynamic Inverter Dead-Time Adjustment Method Based on an Improved GaN HEMTs Switching Model

Benefited from the fast switching speed, Gallium nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) have been widely used in high switching frequency converters. However, due to the significant correlation between the turn-
off
time and operating conditions (more than 20 times difference of the turn-
off
time between the high load current and small load current for GaN HEMTs), using a fixed dead time will introduce extra dead-time (DT) losses in inverters where the output voltage and current are constantly varying. Therefore, this article proposes a high-efficiency adaptive method to dynamically adjust the GaN-inverter DT with operating conditions. An improved transient model including the parasitic inductance and output voltage with bidirectional solution flow has been proposed for GaN HEMTs to increase the accuracy of DT adjustment. Based on this model, the dynamic DT adjustment can be realized without extra sensors for GaN-inverters. Using the dynamic DT adjustment, the experimental results show a peak efficiency of 98.25% in a 1200 W inverter with triangular current mode modulation. Compared with using the fixed DT, the dynamic DT method can reduce the power loss by 26.7% under full load and 49.14% under light load.