SOI smart IGBT with low cost and high performance

The vertical Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistor (IGBT) has gained tremendous popularity in recent years. In the automotive electronics industry, for example, high-volume IGBT applications have emerged in ignition systems and electric vehicle motor control systems. Commensurate with this increasing popularity has been an increasing demand for IGBT devices with monolithic control circuitry. Often referred to as “smart” IGBTs. In response to this demand, several concepts for the realization of a smart IGBT have been reported by various research groups over the past few years. However, the practicality of these concepts has been limited by unacceptable compromises in performance or, more often, cost. This paper describes a promising new smart IGBT concept, based on silicon-on-insulator (SOI) technology, that achieves high performance with relatively low cost