An Ultrafast and Latch-Up Free Lateral IGBT with Hole Diverter for Junction-Isolated Technologies

This paper presents a new lateral insulated gate bipolar transistor (LIGBT) for junction-isolated smart power technologies with a wide safe operating area (SOA) due to the presence of a hole diverter structure encapsulating almost the entire drift region. The device is integrated into an existing 80 V smart power technology with a 0.35 mum CMOS core without changing the process flow. It has a very effective substrate current suppression by means of a double buried layer structure. This structure isolates the device from the substrate, and, hence, it can be used as a high side switch as well. Furthermore, this nLIGBT has a fast switching speed (turn-off times in the order of nanoseconds) and a very wide SOA. The SOA is doubled when compared to a device without lateral hole diverter, resulting in a DC breakdown voltage of 47 V when the gate is fully open, or 63% of the blocking capability in the off-state (75 V). The drawback is an increase of the forward voltage drop (V _ak at a current density of 500 A/cm²) from 1.3 V to 1.5 V for a nLIGBT without and with lateral hole diverter, respectively.