A unified switch loss model and design consideration for multilevel boost PFC with GaN devices

Recently, multilevel converters with gallium nitride (GaN) devices have shown marvelous advantages for power factor correction (PFC) conversion to meet the increasingly higher efficiency and power density requirements. In the traditional design process for the multilevel PFC converter, it is necessary to separately optimize the devices of the corresponding breakdown voltage under different level number, which causes difficulty to the overall optimization of the entire system. In this paper, a unified minimum loss model for GaN switches regardless of voltage levels is proposed to optimize the efficiency based on device's new figure-of-merit (NFoM) (NFoM = COSS(ER) RDS(on)). With the help of this unified minimum loss model, it simplifies the efficiency optimizing methodology according to the NFoMs of GaN devices for multilevel PFC converter. According to the methodology, a 2 kW cascaded H-bridge (CHB) PFC prototype is constructed to verify the design methodology, achieving over 99% efficiency with power density over 1000 W/in³.