Cosmic ray immunity of new IGBT structures for aerospace application

Single-Event-Burnout (SEB) is a catastrophic failure mode in power semiconductor devices triggered by cosmic ray heavy ions. Thus, it is essential to improve the robustness of these devices under this environment. In this paper a new design of planar insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) aimed at improving the immunity to SEB is proposed and validated by employing 3D Sentaurus - simulation. We show a significant decrease of failure compared the conventional IGBT. Moreover, it was analytically derived that reducing the hole current moving under the emitter was effective in increasing the SEB threshold voltage.