A study of 600V punch-through IGBT dynamics under unclamped inductive switching

This paper deals with the 600 V punch-through insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) dynamics under nondestructive unclamped inductive switching (UIS) conditions. These extremely high stress conditions allow to determine the ruggedness of the device. This can be done by evaluating the maximum of avalanche energy which can be handled by the device submitted to the discharge of the unclamped inductive load. This analysis is performed by using a physically-based two-dimensional semiconductor device simulator associated with a circuit simulator which allows to apply boundary conditions. The simulation results, in good agreement with experiments, allow to investigate the dynamics of the IGBT. These results show that the static breakdown voltage value is not reached due to an excess of positive charges in the drift region. Furthermore, the dissipated energy is maximum under the Pbase region of the device, where the power density is the highest, as well as the temperature value.