Many people consider that the design concept in power electronics system (usually in the tens to hundreds kHz range traditionally) is different from the high frequency circuit design (in the tens to hundreds of MHz range), but the story might have been changed by the wide bandgap (WBG) devices.

WBG devices including silicon carbide MOSFETs (SiC-MOSFETs) and gallium nitride transistors (GaN HEMTs) can switch extremely fast and handle huge amount of power. For example, silicon carbide MOSFET (SiC-MOSFET) can swing thousands of volts and hundreds of amperes in a few tens of nano-seconds which means that the dv/dt and di/dt can easily exceed 100V/ns and 10A/ns. Thus in such kind of high-speed system, circuits will be much more sensitive to the parasitic components and impedance continuity then before and the impedance matching and peripheral effect should not be ignored anymore if people are looking to explore the full potential of WBG devices.

When handling enormous power, some of design criteria are hard to realize because of geometric issues. To mitigate these issues, divide and conquer is a good strategy to go. In specific, one could consider the whole details in a sub-level design block which allows designers to modify the peripheral parameters and match the impedance with less geometrical limitations. And then these sub blocks can be modularized and parallelly connected to achieve the required output power.

This concept has been used for years, and will be increasingly important when designing with WBG devices. By implementing an optimized design block, it will be able to realize robust, reliable, compact and efficient power system more easily and quickly, at reduced cost.