Investigation of the short-circuit performance of an IGBT

This paper reports the internal dynamics of insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBT's) under short-circuit switching conditions. Short-circuit performance of IGBT's has been studied in detail with the aid of extensive measurements and numerical simulations. An advanced two-dimensional (2-D) mixed device and circuit simulator that incorporates the self-heating mechanism has been employed to examine IGBT behavior under short-circuit stress. Latch-up free punchthrough IGBT has been examined. It is shown that hot-spot generation due to current crowding and impact ionization is the cause of breakdown of an IGBT under short-circuit switching.