Comparison of temperature limits for Trench silicon IGBT technologies for medium power applications

This work focuses on determining the switching limits in temperature for Reverse Conducting IGBTs and compares them to ‘‘conventional’’ IGBTs based on Trench technologies, all them belonging to 600 V–50 A application scenario. After, their leakage current under blocking state is tested at several working temperatures, in order to study the leakage current that limits the blocking safe operating area with temperature. Next, overcurrent tests have been performed. This investigation deals with understanding the overcurrent induced failures due to thermal effects using short circuit tests adapted to our needs. As a result, we observe that RC-IGBTs integrating a free-wheeling diode show the highest leakage losses in blocking state, whereas it presents the best ruggedness under short circuit tests. 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.