Wide Bandgap Devices Continue to Evolve for Aerospace Applications

From electric aircrafts to satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), the need for fuel saving and greenhouse reduction continues relentlessly. As a result, electrification seems to be catching rapidly in aerospace and aviation applications. This demands new generation of power converters, motor drives, and solid-state circuit breakers with unprecedented power density, efficiency, and reliability. Wide bandgap (WBG) power devices, such as silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFETs and gallium nitride (GaN) high-electron mobility transistors (HEMTs) and gate injection transistors (GITs), are regarded as critical candidates for such applications. While WBG devices have been serving the needs of commercial and industrial systems for more than a decade, there are still many challenges for WBG devices and their circuits for aviation applications, which include radiation hardness, extreme operation temperature, high altitude, high-voltage, high
dv/dt
, and high
di/dt
operation induced issues.