A Monolithic E-Mode GaN Boost Converter IC with Improved Gate Driver

This paper proposed a monolithic GaN IC for a 4SV-to-72V boost converter which includes a GaN power device, power diode, gate driver with the internal bootstrap circuit to fully turn on the GaN power device, and control stage. Because GaN applications involve high switching frequency and high voltages, the parasitic components, especially the parasitic inductance of the printed circuit board (PCB) would greatly affect the switching performance and switching frequency. Therefore, this paper presents a monolithic enhancement-mode GaN IC that reduces the parasitic components which reduces the voltage spike that appears at the power device. Compared to the conventional structures of gate drivers, this work not only improves the output rising (falling) time of the gate driver in output stage but also ensures the gate-source voltage of every GaN device in the gate driver operates less than VDD. This work was fabricated in TSMC 0.5$-\mu$m GaN process and experimentally verified.