Design and analysis of integrated planar inductor for GaN HEMT-based zero-voltage switching synchronous buck converter

Gallium nitride (GaN) high electron mobility transistor (HEMT) has a lateral device structure with a land grid array (LGA) or ball grid array (BGA) device package, which is beneficial in minimizing parasitic parameters as well as the overall device size. These types of packages in conjunction with the lateral device structure possess better thermal performance as compared to the conventional silicon MOSFETs. When a printed circuit board layout is properly designed, the copper traces and pours in the vicinity of the switching devices can serve as effective heat dissipation channels. In this paper, an integrated planar inductor is designed and analyzed to achieve both zero-voltage switching and high thermal performance in a high frequency synchronous buck converter. The conduction losses in the planar inductor can be significantly reduced using multilayer PCB and heavy copper trace.