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• The U.S Department of Energy launched the PowerAmerica Institute under the initiative of “National Network of Manufacturing Institutes (NNMI)” to Accelerate Adoption Wide Band Gap (WBG) power devices • PowerAmerica started operations in 2015 with $140M funds over 5 years, and is managed by North Carolina State University in Raleigh, NC USA • PowerAmerica addresses gaps in technology to enable manufacturing...
Inductive power transfer (IPT) is widely discussed as an alternative to contact charger for plug-in hybrid and electric vehicles (PHEV/EV). This paper analyzes a contactless battery charger back end power factor correction (PFC) concept, which allows to reduce the primary side circuit complexity and physical size. For that purpose, the main volume and loss factors of a contactless battery charger...
This paper presents a compact power control unit (PCU) for hybrid electric vehicles. The authors use silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET power modules with insulated ceramic substrates, resulting in high thermal conductivity. In addition, direct connection of aluminum-made chassis of a reactor and a capacitor to the heat sink makes it possible to highly release heat generation of them. These two measures...
This paper proposes a hypothetic silicon carbide (SiC) metal oxide semiconductor field effect transistor (MOSFET) power module for the medium voltage (MV) variable frequency drive (VFD). A peer-to-peer comparison between commercial silicon (Si) insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) and the proposed SiC MOSFET module results in some promising results to support the introduction of SiC power modules...
The medium voltage (MV) high-speed drives are required for traction, wind energy, marine, aerospace, oil, and gas compressors applications. The MV converter must be able to switch at higher switching frequencies (> 5 kHz) to generate higher fundamental frequency AC input voltages for the motor (≥ 500 Hz) and thereby achieving high speed at the motor output (≥ 15000 rpm). This paper presents the...
1700V SiC modules were built with next-generation SiC MOSFETs, with 25°C RDSON per MOSFET cut approximately 50% from existing commercial SiC MOSFETs. Additionally, the external SiC anti-parallel diode was eliminated in favor of using the SiC MOSFET body diode during the dead time. The resulting 1700V SiC module used only 32% of the SiC chip area, yet reduced the 25°C module RDSON from 8mΩ to 5mΩ,...
The reverse recovery characteristics of the body diodes of planar and double-trench SiC MOSFETs are experimentally analyzed in switching tests and compared. The body diode of the trench SiC MOSFET shows improved performance, so that using an anti-parallel SBD to suppress the reverse recovery behavior becomes unnecessary. Following the switching tests, the devices are operated in continuous mode in...
This paper presents a high efficiency SiC power converter in pulsed power applications. SiC Power MOSFETs have 7∼10 times lower switching loss than Silicon counterparts. However, because of the large depletion capacitance, the SiC device switching loss will be higher than silicon device at zero current. Therefore, loss reduction method is proposed to further improve SiC gradient driver efficiency...
The introduction in the semiconductor market of the SiC technology enables power designers the development of power converters with higher power density (W/m3) in comparison with the traditional converters based on Si power semiconductors. This work presents the redesign of a DC-DC converter, used in railway traction applications with full-SiC modules. The low current rating of the actual full-SiC...
Silicon carbide (SiC) power semiconductor technology has successfully penetrated several silicon (Si) application markets and is gaining momentum due to higher voltage withstand capability, higher switching capabilities (i.e., 100s of kHz), and ability to withstand higher operating temperatures (i.e., more than 200°C). When properly applied, SiC MOSFETs can switch in nanoseconds making this a promising...
This paper introduces a 97% efficiency medium voltage (MV) Solid State Transformer (SST) based on two-level single stage (TLSS) topology and 15 kV SiC MOSFETs. Series resonant converter (SRC) is implemented as the main stage and is identified as a current source (CS) SRC for the first time. Equivalent resonant frequency of the proposed CS-SRC is analyzed in both time domain and frequency domain. Resonant...
In this paper, a comparative evaluation between a commercial 3.3 kV/400 A Si-IGBT and a 3.3 kV/400 A SiC MOSFET power module in half-bridge configuration is presented. With a constant current of 250 A, a lower forward voltage (VDS) drop of 1.6 V is obtained for SiC MOSFET at 300 K compared to Si IGBT. At 400 A, the difference is reduced to 1.3 V. SiC MOSFET offers an on-state resistance of 8.7 mΩ,...
With their intrinsic superiorities such as high breakdown electric field and high thermal conductivity, SiC MOSFETs are replacing Si IGBTs in power electronics applications. However, at higher voltages SiC MOSFETs are at early stage of development and are not commercialized yet. For the first time, this paper presents thorough static and dynamic performance characterization of 3.3 kV and 30 A discrete...
Due to the high switching speed of SiC MOSFET, the parasitic parameters and the low damping in the circuit, the turn-off overvoltage and oscillation of the freewheeling diode and SiC MOSFET are very severe. Based on the terminal impedances during the turn-off transition of the freewheeling diode and SiC MOSFET, the mechanism of the turn-off overvoltage and oscillation are analyzed and the suppressing...
The advancements in wide-band-gap (WBG) devices are enabling applications of power electronics converters coupled directly to medium voltage and incorporating galvanic insulation within the converter using high-frequency solid-state transformers. This paper presents the design and the characterization results of a SiC H-bridge converter suitable for up to 100 kVA single-phase ac-dc modular solid-state...
In this study, design considerations of gate driver for silicon carbide (SiC) power devices is discussed. The work is focused in minimizing the common-mode current injection into the control circuit, thereby adapting the gate circuit to operate at higher dv/dt of fast switching transients. By reducing the common-mode interference with the control circuit, the signal integrity can be increased, spurious...
This paper proposes an Active Gate Current Control (AGCC) strategy for non-insulating gate WBG devices, for example, gallium nitride gate-injection-transistor (GaN-GIT) and silicon carbide super junction transistor (SiC-SJT). It provides a tool for power converter designers to further improve the converter efficiency and to extend the life time of those higher cost power transistors. By continuously...
While investigations on short-circuit ruggedness of discrete SiC MOSFET are widely encountered in the scientific literature, there is not so much research dealing with the operational robustness of high power SiC MOSFET modules. In this paper, the short-circuit (SC) ruggedness under hard switching fault (HSF) of a commercial 1.2 kV/180 A SiC MOSFET power module in half-bridge configuration will be...
A highly accelerated power cycling test platform using current source converter for SiC-MOSFET power modules is proposed. The control principles of delta and average junction temperatures are introduced. By using isolated thermal fibers, the junction temperature (Tj) variations can be monitored during the test process without removal of silicone gel. The power module is tested in the conditions of...
Owing to the high current density but smaller die area of SiC components, high current SiC power modules typically feature a large number of parallel connected dies. Due to the faster electrical dynamics of these power modules, and the inherent mismatch of properties between the dies, certain dies can be poorly utilized — requiring either more dies to achieve a given current rating or a de-rating...
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