No abstract

With the help of an improved die attach the Rth,jc of SiC Schottky diodes can be reduced by 40-50% at a given chip size. This enables a significant higher power density for these SiC diode chips, resulting in a chip shrink of ~ 35% for a given nominal current. This has a significant impact not only on the cost position of the device but also on the switching performance of the diodes, as their capacitive charge directly scales with the chip area. Of course these advantages are accompanied by a small penalty in static losses as the Vf of the diodes at nominal current also slightly increases by the chip shrink. However, the reduction of switching losses dominates upon the marginally increased static losses besides full load operation conditions (which are pretty exceptional in today’s SiC Schottky diode applications) combined with frequencies below 130 kHz. This allows a better competitive positioning against fast Si-based diodes and improved system efficiency at the same time.

A 1200 V SiC JFET has been demonstrated to achieve ultra-low switching losses ten times lower than for industrial grade 1200V Si IGBT. The low switching losses are also shown to compete with the fastest 600V class MOSFET in the market, yielding 1.1% higher PFC stage efficiency for 340 kHz switching frequency, when same device on-resistances were measured. The proposed normally-on JFET also differentiates over the IGBT by its purely Ohmic output characteristics without any voltage threshold, and by a monolithically integrated body diode with practically zero reverse recovery. In this paper we outline as well how the other pre-requisites for a 1200 V SiC switch in applications such as photovoltaic systems and UPS can be fulfilled by the proposed JFET solution: long-term reliability, product cost optimization by low specific on-resistance combined with reasonable process window expectations. Finally, a normally-off like safe operation behavior is ensured by a dedicated driving scheme utilizing a low-voltage Si MOSFET as protection device at system start-up and for system failure conditions.