Characteristics and Switching Patterns of Si/SiC Hybrid Switch

Inhalt:
This paper presents the realization and switching patterns of hybrid switch, in which a power MOSFET and an insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) are connected in parallel. The hybrid parallel connection aims to reach optimum power device performance by providing low static and dynamic losses while improving the current capacity of SiC devices and reducing the loss of Si IGBTs based converters. Considering the different switching speeds and output characteristics of SiC and Si devices in such hybrid structure, the switching sequence should be controlled to utilize the advantage of this two different kinds of devices, hence the switching pattern of hybrid switch is proposed. Simulation results are obtained to validate this approach with respect to the static and dynamic performance. The simulations of a 4 kW Buck converter based on hybrid switch illustrates the efficiency improvement of 2.55 % compared with full Si IGBTs switch.