Keysight and Transphorm Create Power Supply Reference Design that Lowers Product Costs; Speeds Time to Market
Switched-mode power supplies provide greater efficiency, increased power density and lower overall system costs when using GaN devices.
Keysight Technologies, a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world, and Transphorm, Inc., a global supplier of high reliability, high-performance gallium nitride (GaN) power conversion products, have announced the availability of a new power supply reference design that enables engineers to identify and correct design errors before building hardware, thereby lowering product costs and speeding time to market.
Image courtesy of Keysight Technologies
Switched-mode power supplies provide greater efficiency, increased power density and lower overall system costs when using GaN devices. However, GaN, a high switching speed, high-performance wide bandgap semiconductor, can produce voltage spikes that result in detrimental radiated electromagnetic interference. As a result, optimized layout design and placement of components before building hardware is critical when using GaN.
The new power supply reference design (download user guide here), available with Keysight's PathWave Advanced Design System, is a virtual prototype based on Transphorm's 4 kW high efficiency single-phase AC-DC conversion evaluation board. It consists of the component and board models needed for engineers to visualize and optimize the time and frequency domains' behavior of voltages, currents and electromagnetic fields.
"The need for switch-mode power supplies is driving rapid adoption of wide bandgap semiconductors," said Tom Lillig, general manager of Keysight's PathWave Software Solutions division. "The new reference design of Transphorm's high voltage GaN solution will speed time to market of this technology, which is changing how the world powers electronic products."
Keysight's PathWave ADS software provides pre-compliance analysis via a virtual prototype that ensures the intended design configuration performs as intended, eliminating the need to build a virtual workspace. Virtual prototypes are complementary to physical prototypes, which are the gold standard for compliance and measured characteristics. However, they can also be expensive and present physical challenges to certain in-house test and measurement protocols. Virtual prototypes are easy to change and can flag device overstress as warning messages during simulation. The voltage, current and fields can be monitored and corrected at every time step in the simulation. All data is available for analysis including inside a semiconductor package.
"Transphorm looks for partnerships that help our customers close skill gaps, increase design simplicity and reduce time to market," said Philip Zuk, vice president of Worldwide Technical Marketing and North American Sales, Transphorm. "With proper modeling, analysis of any design type prior to physical prototyping is a useful resource. Teaming with Keysight enables us to bring our 4 kW AC-DC power conversion board into a virtual design environment that will be advantageous to product designers."
Additional information about Keysight's Power Electronics design solutions are available at:
Pathwave Ads Power Electronics
About Keysight Technologies
Keysight Technologies, Inc. is a leading technology company that helps enterprises, service providers and governments accelerate innovation to connect and secure the world. Keysight's solutions optimize networks and bring electronic products to market faster and at a lower cost with offerings from design simulation, to prototype validation, to manufacturing test, to optimization in networks and cloud environments. Customers span the worldwide communications ecosystem, aerospace and defense, automotive, energy, semiconductor and general electronics end markets. Keysight generated revenues of $4.3B in fiscal year 2019.
About Transphorm
Transphorm is a global semiconductor company, leading the GaN Revolution with the highest performance, highest reliability GaN devices for high voltage power conversion applications. To ensure this, Transphorm deploys its unique vertically-integrated business approach that leverages the industry’s most experienced GaN engineering team at every development stage: design, fabrication, device and application support. This approach, backed by one of the industry’s largest IP portfolios with over 1000 patents, has yielded the industry’s only JEDEC- and AEC-Q101-qualified GaN FETs.
