A Light-Emitting-Diodes-Integrated Silicon Carbide Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel LED-integrated SiC IGBT that enhances conductivity and reduces power loss, showing significant improvements over traditional SiC IGBTs in static and dynamic performance for high-voltage applications.

Contribution

The integration of III-nitride LEDs into SiC IGBTs introduces photogeneration effects that improve device performance, a novel approach not previously explored.

Findings

Significantly higher electron density in LI-IGBT compared to H-IGBT and CSL-IGBT.

Reduces forward voltage drop by around 38-41%.

Achieves over 260% improvement in BFOM and reduces device loss in simulations.

Abstract

A light-emitting-diodes (LEDs)-integrated silicon carbide (SiC) insulated gate bipolar transistors (LI-IGBT) is proposed in this paper. The novelty of the LI-IGBT depends on the photogeneration effect of III-nitride LEDs embedded in the poly-Si regions of IGBT. Then, the photogenerated carriers are formed in the JFET region and the drift layer, indicating the increase of the conductivity in LI-IGBT as compared with the SiC IGBT with hole-barrier layer (H-IGBT) and the SiC IGBT with charge storage layer (CSL-IGBT). The static simulation results show that the electron density of the LI-IGBT at the middle of the drift layer is separately 17.44 times and 15.81 times higher than those of the H-IGBT and CSL-IGBT, yielding 40.91% and 37.38% reduction of forward voltage drop, respectively, and also, the LI-IGBT shows 304.59% and 263.67% improvements in BFOM as compared with CSL-IGBT and H-IGBT, respectively. For the dynamic simulation in one cycle, the loss of LI-IGBT is separately reduced by 6.57% and 8.57% compared to H-IGBT and CSL-IGBT. Meanwhile, the relationship between VC(sat) and Eturn-off can be optimized by adjusting collector doping and minority carrier lifetime. These results reveal that the proposed SiC IGBT will be more suitable for ultra-high voltage application.