In another interview from PCIM Europe 2023, ipXchange talks with Karim from Future Electronics about their latest GaN demo board, which leverages onsemi’s SiC and GaN devices, and, most importantly, onsemi’s NCP1681 PFC controller IC. This game-changing component is mounted on a daughter card to the highly flexible GaNon platform, and it can be used to greatly improve the efficiency of your industrial or telecommunications power supply (98.5-99%, Power Factor (PF) = 0.99), thanks to its support for bridgeless totem-pole PFC topologies, which eliminate the requirement for the diode bridge present at the input of conventional PFC circuits.
As Karim takes us through this plug-and-play demo board, we soon realise that despite the name, the unit shown at PCIM was primarily a SiC platform, with GaNon aiming to support both 650-V SiC and GaN devices soon, as well as 900-V SiC devices for motor drive applications. The design accepts a universal 85-265 VAC input, with the power level somewhat proportional to the input voltage – 3 kW using 230 VAC, 1.5 kW using 120 VAC – so that is something worth bearing in mind if you are designing products for a global marketplace.
Nevertheless, whether you are choosing to directly integrate GaNon into your end product or use it as a reference design for building a different geometry based on the same circuitry, Future’s latest GaN endeavour maximises the possibilities of designs that use onsemi’s PFC controller IC, so save yourself some development time and skip straight to the final boss!
Keep designing!
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