The IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) 2023, a significant academic conference on integrated circuits, was recently held in Monterey, California, USA.

The paper “A Fully-Integrated Half-Bridge GaN Driver for Bidirectional Power Transfer” from the School of Microelectronics (SME) at the Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) was selected for this conference and won Third Place in the Best Paper Award.

Xinyi LI, a graduate student of SME, is the first author of this paper, and her mentor was Yuan GAO, Assistant Professor of SME.

For the demands of bidirectional energy transfer scenarios, including electrical automotive and portable energy storage devices, this paper proposes a fully-integrated half-bridge GaN driver that can realize bidirectional energy transfer with a single power converter.

At the same time, the three-level/bipolar gate driver adopted by the GaN driver avoids the false turn-on of the GaN rectifier switch in different modes, thus enhancing the reliability of GaN power systems.

Additionally, the fully on-chip integrated bootstrap circuit proposed in this designed scheme protects the gate of the high-side GaN device and further reduces the size of the bootstrap capacitor. The GaN driver has been fabricated and tested, demonstrating high efficiency (93.21%), high power (21.15W), and reliable bidirectional energy transfer.

The IEEE ISCAS is the flagship conference of the IEEE Circuits and Systems (CAS) Society. Since its conception in 1968 and building upon more than fifty years of history and sustained reputation, ISCAS is the premiere forum for researchers in the active fields of theory, design, and implementation of circuits and systems.

IEEE ISCAS 2023 has received over 1,400 paper submissions, with a total of three best paper awards being selected.