Cryogenic Temperature Characterizations of State-of-the-art Cascode 900 V GaN FET

Cryogenic power electronics is becoming increasingly important in applications like, spacecraft, military electric vehicle, medical diagnostic, and super conducting machines. Traditionally, the heaters are required to keep the power electronics circuits warm. To remove the required additional energy and reduce system size and weight, it would be significant to explore the power electronics components performance under cryogenic temperatures operation. As the key component in power electronics system, the power semiconductor device performance under cryogenic temperature is investigated in this article. Recently, a high performance 900 V cascode gallium nitride (GaN) field-effect transistor (FET) with 50 mΩ on-state resistance is released by Transphorm. Due to its high blocking voltage and high efficiency characteristics, this device would be a promising candidate for cryogenic power electronics. Therefore, both the static and dynamic characterization results for this state-of-the-art device are reported in this article. In addition, the power device characterization methods are discussed, which can provide guidance for future cryogenic temperature characterizations.