Advances in SiC VJFETs for renewable and high-efficiency power electronics applications

Abstract

The unique wide bandgap properties of SiC allow the creation of high performance normally-off vertical JFET power device. Due to the vertical nature of the device, it can easily be designed with blocking capability exceeding 2kV with RDS(ON), sp > 3mΩ-cm2, resulting in the lowest specific on-resistance for enhancement mode SiC devices with VBR < 1200V. The low RDS(ON), sp yields a small die size that translates into switching losses that are 5–10X smaller than similarly rated Si IGBTs. When used as an IGBT replacement, a significant reduction in losses can be achieved, greatly increasing the overall system efficiency of solar inverters and other renewable power systems.