Power Electronics Semiconductor Devices [Hardcover]

This book relates the recent developments in several key electrical engineering R&D labs, concentrating on power electronics switches and their use. The first sections deal with key power electronics technologies, MOSFETs and IGBTs, including series and parallel associations. The next section examines silicon carbide and its potentiality for power electronics applications and its present limitations. Then, a dedicated section presents the capacitors, key passive components in power electronics, followed by a modeling method allowing the stray inductances computation, necessary for the precise simulation of switching waveforms. Thermal behavior associated with power switches follows, and the last part proposes some interesting prospectives associated to Power Electronics integration.

Preface xi

Chapter 1. Power MOSFET Transistors 1
Pierre ALOÏSI

1.1. Introduction 1

1.2. Power MOSFET technologies 5

1.2.1. Diffusion process 5

1.2.2. Physical and structural MOS parameters 7

1.2.3. Permanent sustaining current 20

1.3. Mechanism of power MOSFET operation 23

1.3.1. Basic principle 23

1.3.2. Electron injection 23

1.3.3. Static operation 25

1.3.4. Dynamic operation 30

1.4. Power MOSFET main characteristics 34

1.5. Switching cycle with an inductive load 36

1.5.1. Switch-on study 36

1.5.2. Switch-off study 38

1.6. Characteristic variations due to MOSFET temperature changes 44

1.7. Over-constrained operations 46

1.7.1. Overvoltage on the gate 46

1.7.2. Over-current 47

1.7.3. Avalanche sustaining 49