Design of Printed Circuit Boards for Power Electronics Utilizing Gallium Nitride Ball Grid Array Integrated Half Bridges

Performance of power electronic is expected to have improvement by means of wide band gap power devices. However, new functionalities of gallium nitride devices are only extractable with existence of more advance interfacing technologies including packaging. Ball grid array as the advance packaging has brought new challenges in board design while a minimized power loop is demanded in such power electronics as well. Moreover, packages become more complex as the devices are being integrated as ICs. In this paper, we studied conflicts that arise among these requirements. Furthermore, especial manufacturing processes that are required for implementation of above-mentioned measures were investigated. These processes embrace prohibitive costs that are investigated in this work. A new and budget friendly way of fan-out design was introduced for monolithic half bridges. The proposed fan-out was designed for gallium nitride ball grid array devices and was manufactured as a half-bridge printed circuit board. The board was tested and validated required connections and a small power loop inductance of 405 pH successfully.