Short-Circuit Performance Investigation of 10kV+ Rated SiC n-IGBT

Almpanis, Ioannis; Gammon, Peter; Mawby, Philip; Evans, Paul; Empringham, Lee; Lophitis, Neophytos; Antoniou, Marina; Udrea, Florin

Abstract

This paper presents a comprehensive short-circuit robustness investigation of 4H- Silicon Carbide (SiC) n-type Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors (nIGBTs) for Medium-Voltage and High- Voltage applications. Numerical electrothermal TCAD simulations evaluate the IGBT short-circuit behaviour under various conditions and device parameters variation. The internal device current density and temperature distribution show that the parasitic thyristor latch-up and the thermally-assisted leakage current generation can be the failure mechanism of SiC nIGBT when the device temperature in the p-well/n-emitter interface region is about 1500K.

Citation

Almpanis, I., Gammon, P., Mawby, P., Evans, P., Empringham, L., Lophitis, N., …Udrea, F. (2022). Short-Circuit Performance Investigation of 10kV+ Rated SiC n-IGBT. In IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications in Europe (WiPDA-Europe). https://doi.org/10.1109/WiPDAEurope55971.2022.9936475

• Conference Name: IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications in Europe (WiPDA-Europe 2022)
• Conference Location: Coventry, United Kingdom
• Start Date: Sep 18, 2022
• End Date: Sep 20, 2022
• Acceptance Date: Jul 1, 2022
• Online Publication Date: Nov 8, 2022
• Publication Date: Sep 19, 2022
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2022
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 19, 2022
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Book Title: IEEE Workshop on Wide Bandgap Power Devices and Applications in Europe (WiPDA-Europe)
• ISBN: 9781665488143
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/WiPDAEurope55971.2022.9936475
• Keywords: SiC IGBT, short-circuit capability, parasitic thyristor latch-up, electrothermal simulation
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/10909073
• Publisher URL: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9936475
• Related Public URLs: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/sci/eng/wipda2022/