Keysight Technologies, Inc. and Transphorm, Inc. 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.
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.
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.
For more information, visit Transphorm and Keysight.
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