TI expands GaN power portfolio with the industry's smallest and fastest GaN drivers

Expanding on its industry-leading gallium nitride (GaN) power portfolio, Texas Instruments (TI) today announced two new high-speed GaN field-effect transistor (FET) drivers to create more efficient, higher-performing designs in speed-critical applications such as light detection and ranging (LIDAR) and 5G radio-frequency (RF) envelope tracking. The LMG1020 and LMG1210 can deliver switching frequencies of 50 MHz while improving efficiency and enabling five times smaller solution sizes previously not possible with silicon MOSFETs.

With an industry-best drive speed as well as a minimum pulse width of 1 ns, the LMG1020 60-MHz low-side GaN driver enables high-accuracy lasers in industrial LIDAR applications. The small wafer-level chip-scale (WCSP) package of only 0.8 mm by 1.2 mm helps minimize gate-loop parasitics and losses, further boosting efficiency.

The LMG1210 is a 50-MHz half-bridge driver designed for GaN FETs up to 200 V. The device's adjustable dead time control feature is designed to improve efficiency by as much as 5 percent in high-speed DC/DC converters, motor drives, Class-D audio amplifiers as well as other power-conversion applications. Designers can achieve high system-noise immunity with the industry's highest common-mode transient immunity (CMTI) of more than 300 V/ns.