Building on decades of power-management innovation, Texas Instruments (TI) (NASDAQ: TXN) today announced the availability of 600-V gallium nitride (GaN) 70-mΩ field-effect transistor (FET) power-stage engineering samples, making TI the first and only semiconductor manufacturer to publicly offer a high-voltage driver-integrated GaN solution. The new 12-A LMG3410 power stage coupled with TI's analog and digital power-conversion controllers enables designers to create smaller, more efficient and higher-performing designs compared to silicon FET-based solutions. These benefits are especially important in isolated high-voltage industrial, telecom, enterprise computing and renewable energy applications.
"With over 3 million hours of reliability testing, the LMG3410 gives power designers the confidence to realize the potential of GaN and to rethink their power architecture and systems in ways not feasible before," said Steve Lambouses, TI vice president of high-voltage power solutions. "Expanding on TI's reputation for manufacturing capability and extensive system-design expertise, the new power stage is a significant step for the GaN market."
With its integrated driver and features such as zero reverse-recovery current, the LMG3410 provides reliable performance, especially in hard-switching applications where it can dramatically reduce switching losses by as much as 80 percent. Unlike stand-alone GaN FETs, the easy-to-use LMG3410 integrates built-in intelligence for temperature, current and undervoltage lockout (UVLO) fault protection.
Proven Manufacturing and Packaging Expertise
The LMG3410 is the first semiconductor integrated circuit (IC) to include GaN FETs manufactured by TI. Building on years of expertise in manufacturing and process technologies, TI creates its GaN devices in a silicon-compatible factory and qualifies them with practices that are beyond the typical Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) standards to ensure the reliability and robustness of GaN for demanding use cases. Easy-to-use packaging will help increase the adoption of GaN power designs in applications such as power factor controller (PFC) AC/DC converters, high-voltage DC bus converters and photovoltaic (PV) inverters.
Key features and benefits of the LMG3410
- Double the power density. The 600-V power stage delivers 50 percent lower power losses in a totem-pole PFC compared with state-of-the-art silicon-based boost power-factor converters. The reduced bill of materials (BOM) count and higher efficiency enable a reduction in power-supply size of as much as 50 percent.
- Reduced packaging parasitic inductance. The new device's 8-mm-by-8-mm quad flat no-lead (QFN) package decreases power loss, component voltage stress and electromagnetic interference (EMI) compared to discrete GaN solutions.
- Enables new topologies. GaN's zero reverse-recovery charge benefits new switching topologies, including totem-pole PFC and LLC topologies to increase power density and efficiency.
- Expanding the GaN ecosystem
- To support designers who are taking advantage of GaN technology in their power designs, TI is also introducing new products to expand its GaN ecosystem. The LMG5200POLEVM-10, a 48-V to 1-V point-of-load (POL) evaluation module, will include the new TPS53632G GaN FET controller, paired with the 80-V LMG5200 GaN FET power stage. The solution allows for efficiency as high as 92 percent in industrial, telecom and datacom applications.
Availability and Pricing
TI will offer a development kit that includes a half-bridge daughtercard and four LMG3410 IC samples. A second kit contains a system-level evaluation motherboard. When used together, these two kits enable immediate bench testing and design. The two development kits are available for purchase now in the TI store and are priced at $299.00 and $199.00, respectively.
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