Comprehensive Analysis of Short circuit Protections for Silicon-Carbide MOSFET

Abstract

Silicon carbide (SIC) Metal-Oside-Semi-conductor Field-Effect Transistor (MOSFET) have excellent performance compared to traditional silicon components. The short circuit protection of SIC MOSFET plays an important role in ensuring the reliability and performance of SIC MOSFET. Due to the high internal heat flux and short short-circuit endurance time of SIC components, the short-circuit stability of SIC components is lower than that of silicon components. The paper briefly introduces two main types of SIC short circuit: hard switch short circuit and load short circuit and their characteristics, discusses the main types of contact and non-contact short circuit protection methods such as desaturation detection, parasitic inductance detection, gate voltage detection, shunt detection, instantaneous power consumption detection and Rogowski coil detection and compares their advantages and disadvantages. The desaturation detection method is the most widely used short-circuit protection method. Although the cost is low and the structure is simple, The desaturation detection has the inherent disadvantage of detecting the blind spot. The other detection methods overcome the defect of detection blind area, and the detection speed and accuracy are obvious advantages, but they also have their own limitations to limit their popularization.