Turn-off strategies for low-saturation IGBTs to reduce turn-off losses

Loss-optimized turn-off strategies for modern "low-saturation" IGBTs are considered in this paper. TCAD turn-off simulations of the considered approaches reveal the possibility of substantially reducing the turn-off energy losses for such a low saturation IGBT model. An FPGA-based gate driver is implemented and turn-off measurement results with the two-step feedforward-based desaturation pulse method are provided. These results have shown up to a 24% reduction in turn-off energy losses for this most basic approach. Simulation results with various approaches are provided and these show a potential reduction of up to 50% in turn-off energy losses.