Performance assessment of commercial gallium nitride-on-silicon discrete power devices with figure of merit

There have been various technical developments of commercial gallium nitride on silicon power devices over the last couple of years since the initial appearance. Efforts have been made to increase threshold voltage and power density, while reducing stray impedance to improve the efficiency of the power conversion systems. In this paper, seven types of gallium nitride-on-silicon discrete power devices on the market are electrically analyzed and compared in the same test environment. To objectively understand the performance of power semiconductor devices, the figure of merit is derived from the measurements to enable a quantitative comparison. The results demonstrate that the power density of the current commercially available gallium nitride power components already goes beyond the theoretical limitation of the silicon material. Moreover, switching capability of commercial gallium nitride-on-silicon devices are found to be fourteen-times-better than that of a state-of-the-art silicon device from the same category.