A Family of Reverse Conducting Gate Commutated Thyristors for Medium Voltage Drive Applications

With the technological breakthrough of the Hard Driven GTO [1] many performance limiting thyristor trade-offs are no longer valid and a novel thyristor technology, the Integrated Gate Commutated Thyristor (IGCT) [2] emerged. Due to a transistor turn-off mode snubberless switching up to the avalanche limit is no longer an issue. Usable switching frequencies only limited by thermal considerations expand to the kHz range. By implementation of the Transparent Emitter Buffer Layer technology [2] and a novel patented separation technique, monolithic integration of the thyristor and the anti-parallel freewheeling diode was achieved without any cumbersome compromises in diode performance. For state of the art diode turnoff performance lifetime tailoring by means of particle irradiation was used. An IGCT family specially developed for the demands of medium voltage drive inverters in the range of 0.5 to 6 MVA is presented and their characteristics are discussed.

[1]  Peter K. Steimer,et al.  Five level GTO inverters for large induction motor drives , 1993, Conference Record of the 1993 IEEE Industry Applications Conference Twenty-Eighth IAS Annual Meeting.

[2]  A. Zuckerberger,et al.  Hard drive of high power GTOs: better switching capability obtained through improved gate-units , 1996, IAS '96. Conference Record of the 1996 IEEE Industry Applications Conference Thirty-First IAS Annual Meeting.

[3]  P.K. Steimer,et al.  IGCT-a new emerging technology for high power, low cost inverters , 1997, IAS '97. Conference Record of the 1997 IEEE Industry Applications Conference Thirty-Second IAS Annual Meeting.

[4]  W. Fichtner,et al.  Design considerations for a 7 kV/3 kA GTO with transparent anode and buffer layer , 1996, PESC Record. 27th Annual IEEE Power Electronics Specialists Conference.

[5]  Mark Frecker,et al.  The Integrated Gate-Commutated Thyristor: A New High-Efficiency, High- Power Switch for Series or Snubberless Operation , 1997 .

[6]  Simon Eicher.  The transparent anode GTO (TGTO) , 1996 .

[7]  Eric Carroll,et al.  A NEW RANGE OF REVERSE CONDUCTING GATE-COMMUTATED THYRISTORS FOR HIGH-VOLTAGE, MEDIUM POWER APPLICATIONS , 1997 .