DV/DT immunity and recovery time capability of 1.0 cm2 silicon carbide SGTO

The silicon carbide SGTO is a future switching component technology of interest to the Army for various pulsed power applications. The research presented in this paper investigates the dV/dt immunity and recovery time (Tq) capability of 1.0 cm2 silicon carbide (SiC) super gate turn-off thyristors (SGTOs). The 1.0 cm2 SiC SGTO is the largest chip based silicon carbide thyristor reported. The SiC SGTO was designed by SPCO and Cree Inc., while the fabrication was done by Cree Inc. This work highlights improved results for both the recovery time and transient voltage immunity compared to the smaller SiC GTO that was previously reported at PPC 2009. The pulse evaluation results in this work show that the SiC SGTO did not require assisted gate turn-off and achieved a recovery time less than 25 μs after a 1-ms wide current pulse current of 1.7 kA, corresponding to an action level of 1.445 × 103 A2s. Finally, the SiC SGTO was evaluated for dV/dt immunity with an instantaneous rise time greater than 9 kV/μs.