Technology development of an intergrated GaN switch power module for totem-pole bridgeless boost converter

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Data centers are the backbone of global economic and consume an enormous amount of energy. U.S datacenters consumed about 70 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity in 2014 and will double that amount by 2020.An AC - DC rectifier converts the AC grid voltage to the motherboard of the data center to power the CPU,memory, network ports, etc. It contains two stages. The first stage is the Power Factor Correction (PFC) stagewhich converts the AC voltage to 400V DC and the second stage is a DC-DC converter that converts 400V to12V. It is very important to increase the efficiency of the AC - DC Rectifier.The existing AC - DC rectifiers use MOSFET (Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor) weredeveloped 40 years ago. The performance of MOSFET has reached its theoretical limits. The new GaN switch(Gallium Nitride) is a revolutionary advancement in power semiconductor technology and can significantlyimprove the efficiency of power supplies. However, there is still a big technical gap between the existing GaNswitch based designs and the optimum designs that could be achieved by GaN switches.This project will focus on the PFC stage of the data center rectifiers. A half-bridge GaN switch moduletechnology will be developed and employed in the bridgeless Boost converter to achieve 99% efficiency, whichwill only dissipate less than half of the loss of the MOSFET counterpart. This will enable the data centerrectifier to meet the highest Titanium efficiency level of Energy Star 80 PLUS standard. The developedtechnology can also be used in the second stage of the data center rectifiers and improve its performance.With the completion of this project, the Toronto design center of Murata Power Solutions will be able to designthe most efficient data center power supply in the world and expand its sales volume in this market. GaNSystems will also demonstrate the full potential of their GaN switches used in the server as well as other powersupplies. Therefore, the project will also increase the publicity and sales volume of GaN Systems.In addition, 5 Highly-Qualified-Personnel (HQP) will be trained in this project.