An investigation of turn-off performance of planar and trench gate IGBTs under soft and hard switching

Abstract

This paper presents the results of an investigation into the turn-off performance of planar and trench gate IGBTs under conditions of soft and hard switching topologies. Voltage and current waveforms, power losses, electric field distributions, and carrier behaviors inside the chips are studied through simulation and experiment. It is noted that the trench gate IGBT has advantage over the planar gate IGBT for hard switching application. On the other hand, the turn-off loss of the planar gate IGBT under soft switching application is slightly lower than that of the trench gate IGBT.