Critical overcurrent turn-off close to IGBT current saturation

Author

Philippou, A. ; Jaeger, C. ; Laven, J.G. ; Baburske, R. ; Schulze, H.-J. ; Pfirsch, F. ; Niedernostheide, F.-J. ; Vellei, A. ; Itani, H.

Author_Institution

Infineon Technol. AG, Neubiberg, Germany

fYear

2015

fDate

10-14 May 2015

Firstpage

113

Lastpage

116

Abstract

A failure mechanism in the edge termination of a 1200V IGBT during overcurrent turn-off is studied with simulations and verified by experiments. The position of the destruction in the experiment can be correlated to the formation of a critical filament in the simulation. The destruction mechanism is investigated in detail. It is only observed if the IGBT enters its current saturation regime. I.e., the IGBT survives a turn-off from the same current level for an increased gate voltage. It is shown that an IGBT provided with a properly-designed High Dynamic Ruggedness (HDR) edge termination structure [1] is no longer susceptible to the destruction mechanism.

Keywords

failure analysis; insulated gate bipolar transistors; overcurrent protection; HDR edge termination structure; IGBT current saturation regime; critical overcurrent turn-off; destruction mechanism; failure mechanism; high dynamic ruggedness; voltage 1200 V; Current density; Insulated gate bipolar transistors; Logic gates; Plasma density; Robustness; Switches;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Power Semiconductor Devices & IC's (ISPSD), 2015 IEEE 27th International Symposium on

Conference_Location

Hong Kong

ISSN

1943-653X

Print_ISBN

978-1-4799-6259-4

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ISPSD.2015.7123402

Filename

7123402