Static and Dynamic Cryogenic Characterizations of Commercial High Performance GaN HEMTs for More Electric Aircraft

More electric aircraft (MEA) concept is becoming increasingly popular due to its significant reductions in both system loss and weight. Superconducting machines and cables can improve the system current capability and reduce loss, which has been adopted in the MEA applications. Commonly, liquid gas, including nitrogen, hydrogen, and helium, are used to achieve the cryogenic temperature operations. By operating the power electronics systems in the same cryogenic environment, the system weight and power loss can be further reduced. To investigate the power electronics performances under cryogenic temperatures, the key component-semiconductors are selected and investigated in this article at liquid nitrogen temperature. 100 V and 650 V commercial gallium nitride (GaN) high-electron-mobility transistors (HEMTs) are selected and characterized, including the static and dynamic characterizations. The results illustrate that GaN HEMT is a very promising candidate for cryogenic applications with reduced conduction loss and switching loss. The major concern would be the very fast switching speed at low temperature operations, which poses great challenges on the printed circuit board (PCB) layout and gate driver design. Meanwhile, due to the current limitation of commercial available GaN HEMTs, paralleling operations of multiple devices are required.