Efficient Power Conversion Corporation (EPC) introduces the EPC9107, a fully functional buck power conversion demonstration circuit. This board is a 9 V-28 V input to 3.3 V, 15 A maximum output current, 1MHz buck converter. It uses the EPC2015 eGaN FET in conjunction with the LM5113 100V half-bridge gate driver from Texas Instruments. The EPC9107 demonstrates the reduced size and performance capabilities of high switching frequency eGaN FETs when coupled with this dedicated eGaN driver.
The EPC9107 demonstration board is 3” square and contains a fully closed-loop buck converter with optimized control loop. The complete power stage including eGaN FETs, driver, inductor and input/output caps is in an ultra compact 0.5” x 0.5” layout to showcase the performance that can be achieved using the eGaN FETs with the LM5113 eGaN driver.
Despite its small size, the board has peak power efficiency greater than 96% and is capable of delivering 15 amps of current at 3.3 volts. To assist the design engineer, the EPC9107 demonstration board is easy to set up and contains various probe points to facilitate simple waveform measurement and efficiency calculation.