It’ll be hard to do anything without the capability of making useful schematics and board layouts. I’m using Fusion 360, a reasonbly nice commercial CAD system, the electronics part of which grew out of Eagle. It’s been awhile, and they are constantly updating and changing things, so I figured I’d go through a tutorial while working up a simple board. I picked building a half bridge driver board for the Nexperia GAN190-650FBE GaN transistor, because these are new and interesting devices for which dev boards are not available.

The bill of materials isn’t too complicated. Here is what I’ll need:

  • GAN190-650FBE (x2)
  • NCP51530AMNTWG (half-bridge driver, as recommended by AN90041)
  • 4 pin header, for the driver power and HIN and LIN inputs
  • Power input, ground, and output
  • a LED so we can see if it’s on
  • some resistors and diodes (to step down the driver output to the ~6.2V Nexperia’s e-mode GaNs like) And I think that’s it. I’m trying to keep this simple.

Finding suitable footprints for components is a key part of dealing with boards. Building libraries of these, tested and known to work with your manufacturing processes, is a major task. Lots of things are available online from various sources, for example the driver chip has a footprint in UltraLibrarian. But the GAN190-650FBE is new enough that I haven’t found something online. That’s okay, it just means we have to create the component ourselves, based on the datasheet. Here is the tutorial I’ll be following for that. Wish me luck.