Investigation of repetitive short-circuit operation of 1200 V IGBTs in the IC-VCE phase space

Abstract

This work shows an investigation of repetitive Short-Circuit (SC) operation of 1200 V–15 A IGBT far above the Short-Circuit Safe Operating Area (SC-SOA). The goal behind this work was to perform repetitive SC tests with test conditions provoking the formation of current filaments in the short-circuit pulse, which leads to a non-homogeneous heating but not to a destruction. The target was to investigate unknown physical effects that lead to device degradation during the repetitive SC test. The IGBT device shows strong deterioration in its blocking characteristic after it was subjected to several 1000 SC pulses at extremely high SC levels.