IGCT—a New Emerging Technology for High Power, Low Cost Inverters

Thyristor technology has, for basic physical rules, superior characteristics to transistors in blocking voltages above 2.5 kV since the plasma distributions equal those of diodes, resulting in the best trade-offs between on-state and blocking voltage. However, by adding the gate turn-off feature, GTOs have so far been constrained by a variety of unsatisfactory compromises [1], The widely used standard GTO drive technology resulted in nonhomogeneous turn-on and turn-off transients, requiring costly dv/dt- and di/dt-snubber circuits [2], [3], combined with bulky gate drive units.