Performance evaluation and characterization of 6500V asymmetric SiC NPNP Thyristor based current switch

The main motivation of this work is to evaluate performance and characteristics of a 6.5kV SiC Thyristor based current switch (series connected active switch and diode). A unique series resonant testing circuit has been proposed to characterize this switch. The device has been tested in several soft and hard turn on and off transitions. Conceptual simulation and hardware results have been presented. It has been shown that SiC Thyristor exhibit fast turn-on transitions (~200ns). This coupled with the fact that SiC-JBS Diode (connected in series) has fast reverse voltage commutation leads to an efficient and robust switch combination for a high voltage, high power and high frequency converter. The collected data has been used to estimate overall device losses of a high voltage and high power resonant soft-switched converter.