Design of lateral IGBT protection circuit for smart power integration

Abstract

Monolithic integration of lateral insulated gate bipolar transistor (LIGBT) in power integrated circuits is a current research topic. The overcurrent protection scheme is usually necessary to be built as part of the functions in power integrated circuits. The protection circuit requires to distinguish various fault conditions and to react differently based on the device safe operating area (SOA) limitation. At the same time, the circuit should also be relatively concise and suitable for integration. In this paper, a concise gate drive protection circuit is proposed to provide the complete function of overcurrent protection for LIGBT. The performance of the circuit was verified with experimental results. The implementation of the proposed circuit on lateral IGBT is also discussed and the simulation results are presented.