Ultra-Fast Switching 3.3kV SiC High-Power Module

We present static and dynamic performance of a 3.3kV SiC half-bridge module built on the ABB module platform – LinPak. The module exploits a multilevel/stacked substrate concept to achieve a low inductance, balanced current sharing and switching without critical oscillations. 20 MOSFETs are paralleled per switch position of the half-bridge and the MOSFET’s intrinsic body diode is used instead of the usual additional SiC Schottky diode. Switching losses of the SiC module are more than 9 times lower compared to the 3.3kV Si IGBT version of the module. Such low-switching losses of SiC compared to Si are typically measured only for discrete devices and not for high-power modules and enable unprecedented efficiency and compactness in high-power converter applications. To illustrate potential benefits, the paper provides a comparison of converter designs based on the 3.3 kV SiC module and the state-of-the art Si counterpart.