The dual gate power device exhibiting the IGBT and the thyristor action

This new power device is fabricated and demonstrated for the first time. The device can behave as an insulated gate field-effect transistor (IGBT) or a thyristor by adding a second control gate. The characteristics obtained experimentally are that the forward voltage for the thyristor mode is 1.2 V at 100 A/cm/sup 2/, the device transits between two operation modes within only 200 ns, and the switching speed for the IGBT mode is the same as the usual IGBT. All these results indicate that the trade-off relation between the forward voltage and switching speed was greatly improved by the additional gate.<
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