Ultra high speed short circuit protection for IGBT with gate charge sensing

Short circuit (SC) protection for IGBT has been crucial issue since IGBTs have become major switching devices for power electronics applications. According to the IGBT performance improvement, chip current density has been increased and the chip has become as thin as 100 μm. The high current density and thin wafer chip result in high temperature rising speed during SC condition and hence high speed protection scheme for IGBT is highly required. Conventional methods, such as sense IGBT configuration, have the response time of 5 micro second, for example, which is not sufficient to protect advanced IGBTs. In this paper, we propose a novel protection method with response time shorter than 1 micro second.