13kV UHV-IGBT: Feasibility Study

Increasing the rated voltage of IGBTs is indispensable for realizing future energy transmission systems such as gigawatt-class UHVDC and high-power motor drives with reduced number of series connection or simplified circuit topology. The voltage of IGBTs, however, has stagnated for 20 years at 6.5kV because of several issues. In this paper, we investigated the feasibility of a 13kV ultra-high voltage IGBT with twice the breakdown voltage of conventional IGBTs using TCAD simulations. As a result, the use of a double gate structure proved to be practical under DC bus voltage of 6.6 kV and a switching frequency of 150 Hz.