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Future Trends in Laminated Busbar Technology – SiC, GaN, and Beyond

07/08

2026

By A&JLINK Engineering Team · Last updated July  2026 · 8 min read
The short answer
How wide-bandgap semiconductors and higher system voltages are reshaping the laminated busbar.
  • ✓What's driving the change. SiC and GaN switch orders of magnitude faster than silicon IGBTs, turning parasitic inductance into a reliability risk.
  • ✓The headline shift. Low inductance is no longer an advantage — it is the price of admission for a busbar feeding SiC or GaN.
  • ✓The other trends. Higher voltage, higher integration, and simulation-first design.
For most of its history, the laminated busbar was a quiet, reliable workhorse — a low-inductance conductor that did its job without much fanfare. That is changing. The rise of wide-bandgap semiconductors, silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), has pushed switching speeds up by an order of magnitude, and the busbar has been dragged into the spotlight as the component that either unlocks that speed or silently kills it.
This article maps the technology trends reshaping laminated busbar design. It is deliberately a wide view — the landscape, not a deep dive into any single mechanism. Where a specific topic deserves a closer look, we point to the dedicated article.
Scope: this article surveys the technology trends driving laminated busbar design — wide-bandgap switching, higher voltage, integration, and simulation. For the underlying inductance physics, see our parasitic inductance deep dive; for the standards these designs must meet, see our standards guide.
A laminated busbar is the backbone of low-inductance power distribution, and the trends below are what will define that backbone over the next decade.

1. Why Busbar Technology Is Entering a New Era

The single biggest driver is the wide-bandgap transition. Silicon IGBTs have been the workhorse of power electronics for decades, but SiC and GaN switch far faster — SiC devices now exceed 100 kV/μs switching speed, with GaN going higher still. That speed is a gift for efficiency and power density, but it carries a cost.
Faraday's law is unforgiving: a voltage overshoot appears across any stray inductance as V = L × di/dt. At the di/dt values wide-bandgap devices produce — tens of amperes per nanosecond — even a few nanohenries of stray inductance produce damaging voltage spikes. The busbar, which sits directly in that switching loop, is no longer a passive conductor. It is now the difference between a converter that runs clean and one that rings, overshoots, and eventually fails.
This is why the laminated busbar is entering a new era: it is being redefined by the semiconductor it feeds.

2. SiC and GaN Are Redefining the Inductance Requirement

The numbers make the stakes concrete. In STMicroelectronics' analysis of low-parasitic SiC packaging, at a DC-bus voltage of 860 V and a di/dt of 18.9 A/ns, every single nanohenry of extra parasitic inductance contributes 18.9 V of voltage overshoot. A conventional discrete busbar with 20–100 nH of inductance is therefore unusable in that context; a laminated structure that collapses the loop area and drops inductance into the single-digit nanohenry range — the same analysis cites a reduction from 6.6 nH to 4.61 nH — is what makes the design viable.
GaN pushes the requirement further still. Because GaN devices routinely switch above 100 kHz, the acceptable loop inductance tightens toward 1 nH or below, which demands even more aggressive geometry — thinner dielectrics, wider conductors, and tighter coupling between the forward and return paths.
The practical meaning is worth stating plainly: low inductance has stopped being a differentiator and become a threshold. A busbar that cannot get inductance down to the low nanohenries is simply disqualified from the next generation of power stages. For the underlying physics of how that inductance is controlled, see our deep dive on parasitic inductance in laminated busbars.

3. The Push to Higher Voltage

In parallel with faster switching, system voltages are climbing. The clearest example is the AI data center, where power delivery is moving from 48 V through ±400 V and toward 800 V HVDC — with some architectures already specifying 3000 A of current at sub-20 nH inductance. EV traction inverters have settled around 800 V, and grid and rail equipment has long operated at multi-kilovolt levels.
Higher voltage makes the busbar's insulation a harder problem. Thinner dielectric layers reduce inductance, but they must still withstand the working voltage without partial discharge — for an 800 V system, a polyimide or epoxy dielectric of at least 0.2 mm is a common starting point. This is where the inductance goal and the safety requirement come into tension, and it is worth noting that the higher-voltage segments move beyond the low-voltage scope of IEC 60664-1, requiring a stronger insulation-coordination basis. For how the standards map onto these designs, see our guide on laminated busbar standards and certifications.

4. Higher Integration — From Conductor to Subsystem

The third trend is integration. The busbar is increasingly delivered not as a bare conductor but as a subsystem that carries more of the power stage with it.
Capacitor integration is the most mature form: building the DC-link capacitance directly into the busbar shortens the switching loop and cuts inductance where it matters most. Sensor integration is the emerging one — temperature sensing and current sampling embedded into the busbar enable real-time thermal and electrical monitoring, which matters as power stages push closer to their limits. Connectors and terminals are likewise being co-designed into the stack rather than bolted on afterward. For how capacitor integration works in detail, see our guide on integrated capacitor busbar design.
The trend is the same one the wider electronics industry already went through: fewer discrete parts, more co-designed subsystems, and more of the engineering moved into a single, tightly integrated assembly.

5. Materials and Simulation Are Advancing Together

Two quieter trends are doing much of the heavy lifting. On the materials side, thinner copper layers, high-performance polyimide films, and laser-welded terminals are expanding what a busbar can achieve — thinner dielectrics for lower inductance, higher-temperature films for harder thermal duty, and welding for joints that stay stable under thermal cycling.
On the design side, the work has moved into simulation. Co-simulation of the busbar with the power devices and capacitors — tools like Ansys Q3D for parasitic extraction combined with multiphysics thermal and structural analysis — lets engineers optimize inductance, current sharing, and temperature before a single prototype is built. This is a shift from measure-and-fix to simulate-and-verify, and it is how the tighter inductance and thermal margins of wide-bandgap designs actually get met. For how the thermal side of this simulation is applied, see our guide on laminated busbar thermal simulation.

6. Summary: What This Means for Your Next Design

The laminated busbar is no longer a commodity that follows the power stage; it is a design element that shapes it. Wide-bandgap semiconductors have made low inductance a threshold, not a luxury. Higher voltages have made insulation a first-order constraint. Integration has turned the busbar into a subsystem. And simulation has made all of it predictable before hardware exists.
For your next design, the implication is simple: specify the busbar early, and specify it against the real switching speeds and voltages of the devices you are using — not the silicon-era assumptions the industry carried for decades. The designs that survive the wide-bandgap transition are the ones that treated the busbar as part of the solution from the start.
Designing Around SiC or GaN?
Send us your switching frequency, voltage, and current requirements — our engineers will review feasibility and come back with design recommendations.
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References & Standards

  1. IEC 60664-1 — Insulation coordination for equipment within low-voltage supply systems. International Electrotechnical Commission. webstore.iec.ch
  2. IEC 60216 — Electrical insulating materials – Thermal endurance properties. International Electrotechnical Commission. webstore.iec.ch
  3. IEC 61439-1 — Low-voltage switchgear and controlgear assemblies. International Electrotechnical Commission. webstore.iec.ch

Prev: Laminated Busbar Thermal Simulation – ANSYS Best Practices

Next: Laminated Busbar Standards and Certifications – What You Need to Know

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