Sandwich design of high-power thyristor based devices with integrated MOSFET structure

The increasing use of renewable resources such as wind and solar energy requires robust power converters for feeding energy into the grid. However, conventional power converters, including coupled Integrated Gate Commutated Thyristors (IGCTs), are sensitive to temperature changes and vibrations. To decouple the thyristor from the driver, an Integrated Emitter Turn-Off device (IETO) had been presented. Based on this IETO, this current paper introduces a sandwich design of high-power thyristor devices. The electrical, thermal and mechanical aspects of such devices were first simulated and then the optimal design was built and tested. The aforementioned aspects of the new design attained the levels of IGCT devices. In conclusion, the newly proposed decoupled sandwich design with integrated MOS structure shows enormous potential for feeding fluctuating power into the grid. In particular, this sandwich design is ideal in terms of parasitic inductance; this means the lower the inductance is, the greater the power density of the whole thyristor structure is.