High-power GaN ICs bring production-ready performance to EVs

Navitas Semiconductor has announced that its high-power GaNSafe ICs have achieved automotive qualification for AEC-Q100 and AEC-Q101, showcasing GaN's next inflection into the automotive market.

The company's high-power GaNSafe 4th generation family incorporates control, drive, sensing, and critical protection features that allow unprecedented reliability and robustness in high-power applications. It is the world's safest GaN with short-circuit protection (350ns max latency), 2kV ESD protection on all pins, elimination of negative gate drive, and programmable slew rate control. All these features are controlled with four pins, allowing the package to be treated like a discrete GaN FET, requiring no VCC pin.

The Automotive Electronics Council (AEC) lists various qualifications focused on failure mechanism-based stress tests for packaged integrated circuits (AEC-Q100) and discrete semiconductors (AEC-Q101) used in automotive applications. The company's IC has been qualified to both standards to ensure that the discrete power FET stage and the combined IC solution satisfy these stringent specifications.

The company has created a comprehensive reliability report that analyses over seven years of production and field data to support the qualification. It demonstrates their track record, alongside generational and family improvements in robustness and reliability, establishing GaN power ICs as highly reliable and automotive-ready. This reliability report is available to qualified customers.

Also, in March 2025, the company unveiled the world's first production-released 650V Bi-Directional GaNFast ICs with IsoFast Drivers, creating a paradigm shift in power to enable the transition from two-stage to single-stage topologies to further enhance efficiency, power density, and performance in AC/DC and AC/AC conversion. This would enable next-generation single-stage OBCs to provide bi-directional charging in a high-efficiency, extremely compact solution, eliminating bulky capacitors and input inductors.

A leading EV and solar micro-inverter manufacturer has already begun implementing single-stage BDS converters to improve efficiency, size, and cost in their systems. GaNFast-enabled single-stage BDS converters attain up to 10% cost savings, 20% energy savings, and up to 50% size reductions.

"Our latest reliability report is the culmination of years of innovation and field experience," said Gene Sheridan, CEO and co-founder of Navitas. "With more than 250 million units shipped, over two trillion field devices hours and a cumulative field failure rate that is now approaching 100 parts per billion, we're leading the charge in making GaN the go-to technology for EV power systems."