If you’ve been keeping up with market predictions about electric vehicles, the notion of rising demand for high power and efficient fast-charging solutions to enhance the user experience and enable higher acceptance is familiar to you.

In the past, DC fast chargers for EVs depended on well-established silicon-based semiconductor devices, such as MOSFETs and IGBTs in their AC-DC power factor correction (PFC) and subsequent isolated DC-DC converter stages. While these silicon-based technologies have served as the industry standard, they’re increasingly encountering fundamental material limits, particularly when faced with the high-power and high-frequency demands of modern EV fast charging.

Still, the inherent limits of conventional silicon-based converters in terms of power density, efficiency, and thermal performance hinder the development of smaller-sized and higher-power solutions.

Modern EV fast chargers now use wide-bandgap (WBG) semiconductors like silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium mitride (GaN) to replace older silicon parts. WBG semiconductors promise to revolutionize the design of EV rapid chargers, paving the way to the development of more efficient, lightweight, and ultimately ubiquitous next generation solutions.

GaN-based DC-DC converters for next-generation EV fast charging, for example, enable high switching speeds, lower losses, and more compact designs, achieving up to 30% to 50% efficiency improvement over silicon. Key design aspects include advanced gate driving, high-frequency magnetics, EMI mitigation, thermal management, and digital control.

GaN HEMTs have been adopted into many commercial power-supply designs covering a broad range of applications that take advantage of the technology’s fast-switching capability with low losses. Until recently, GaN has been positioned to dominate mid-voltage (400 to 900 V) EV chargers.

Keeping Pace with Roadmap Demands

GaN technology, though, must keep pace with EV, data center, renewables, and HVDC infrastructure roadmaps calling for higher voltages and greater power density. Commercially available devices from various manufacturers typically offer voltage ratings below 200 V and in the 600- to 650-V range.

To take advantage of GaN’s benefits in 800-V DC bus applications, 650-V GaN devices have been used in a two-in-series stacked half-bridge configuration with a total of four 650-V GaN devices. While this stacked topology can operate at the high frequencies that’s possible with GaN, it introduces several challenges, including increased control complexity, reliability risk due to input voltage imbalance, larger footprint, and greater conduction loss resulting in lower efficiency and higher cost.

Commercially available GaN HEMT technologies built using a silicon substrate are very difficult to scale to voltages beyond 900 V due to the need for very thick buffer layers, which adds significant processing challenges. Thus, applications needing WBG power devices with 1,200-V rating and beyond have been constrained to using SiC switches.

However, GaN potentially enables much higher switching frequency compared to SiC. It can also provide a pathway to meeting the increasing power density required by various applications, while maintaining high efficiency.

Similarly, the demands of AI computing are driving data center power architectures toward higher efficiency and power density.

Speaking on the transition to 800-V DC data center power to support megawatt-scale racks, Roy Dagher, PhD, technology and market analyst, Compound Semiconductors, at Yole Group, said, “The shift to 800-V DC bus architectures in AI data centers is reshaping power semiconductors. GaN's voltage ceiling has kept it out of the main power path, ceding that ground to SiC. A 2,200-V rating changes this, giving margin for single-stage topologies and future-proofing emerging 1,500-V data center and EV designs. We expect the power GaN device market to reach $3.5 billion by 2031, and extending GaN into these higher-voltage applications is an important part of that growth.”

2,200-V GaN Technology

Attempting to change things, Power Integrations demonstrated the world's only commercially available 2,200-V GaN technology, exceeding, the company claims, the voltage capabilities of all other commercially available GaN technologies. This breakthrough opens the door to higher power density, greater efficiency, and simpler high-voltage power architectures for next-generation EVs, AI data centers, renewable-energy systems, and HVDC infrastructure.

“Our 2,200-V PowiGaN technology provides substantial voltage margin for emerging high-voltage power systems while enabling the high switching frequencies required to maximize power density,” said Jennifer Lloyd, president and CEO at Power Integrations.

“Emerging applications include next-generation AI data centers, where industry roadmaps point toward 1,500-V distribution architectures, as well as future EV battery and auxiliary power systems operating at increasingly higher output voltages (48 V). This milestone breakthrough extends the reach of GaN into voltage ranges traditionally served by SiC, enabling a compelling high-frequency alternative for applications such as solar, HVDC, and advanced industrial power conversion.”

The introduction of 2,200-V PowiGaN technology means that even higher bus architectures can be supported, future-proofing power designs not only for data centers but also for EVs, photovoltaic inverters, and battery-energy storage systems