A full power emulation platform for evaluating power semiconductors

The operation principles of the full-bridge energy recirculation and storage circuit are explored and extended to evaluate power semiconductors under both soft-switching and hard-switching conditions. Combining frequency varying and phase shifting control, the energy is able to be recirculated inside the circuit emulating the high-power conditions for device under test. With a low-power supply only compensating for system losses, the use of costly high-power supply and load is successfully avoided. As an example, an IMS-based half-bridge power module with four 30 A/650 V GaN HEMTs in parallel is evaluated by the proposed full power emulation platform. The results show a good correlation between theoretical projections, simulation and experiments.