Implementation of the NIST IGBT model based on ordinary differential equations

Modeling the electrical behavior of insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) with ideal and instantaneous transitions allows a fast and efficient simulation of power electronic circuits at the system level. Some phenomena at the very moment of the switching transition are neglected however by this modeling method, such as the turn-on and turn-off delay time of the IGBTs or gate drive circuit requirements. The more detailed NIST¹ IGBT model accounting for these effects requires an algebraic differential equation (DAE) solver, which solves the system equations in a sophisticated iterative manner. On the other hand, system level simulators such as PLECS use a description of physical models based on ordinary differential equations (ODEs) for the sake of speed and stability of the simulation. The following work presents a description of the NIST IGBT model using ODEs and an implementation in PLECS. It is then compared by means of transient simulation to existing implementations in other circuit simulators.