Performance Evaluation of an Electric Vehicle Traction Drive using Si/SiC Hybrid Switches

The parallel connection of a Silicon (Si)-based IGBT and a Silicon Carbide (SiC)-based MOSFET forming a so called hybrid switch (HyS) can be used to exploit the advantageous features of both semiconductor and materials technologies. In this paper, a HyS-based inverter designed for the application of Electric Vehicle (EV) traction is compared to the conventional inverter assembled with Si-based IGBTs and SiC-based MOS-FETs. According to different standardized driving cycles, EVs operate in low partial load for a considerable amount of the time. Therefore, in this application, semiconductor conduction losses can be considerably reduced when unipolar switches such as MOSFETs are used. All in all, this work shows that the HyS configuration constitutes a good compromise between efficiency and cost when compared to the solution implementing only Si-based IGBT or solely SiC-based MOSFETs.