A new, high speed, unique switch

An effort was made to devise a new semiconductor switch which has the switching speed of the emitter-open switching, but only requires a standard base drive configuration (see figure 1 for my definition of standard base drive). The result of the research is a new semiconductor switch which achieves higher switching speed than emitter-open switching, lower forward voltage drop (particularly for very high current applications, involving hundreds of amperes), considerably lower cost, and uses more readily available parts. It is free from reverse biased secondary breakdown, a predominant mode of failure of many semiconductor switches.