Analytical Determination of Majority Carrier Diode Losses in Power Switching and Perspective for Ultrawide Bandgap Semiconductors

Ultra wide bandgap (UWBG) materials have exciting potential for power electronic applications due to their high breakdown electric fields. However, current UWBG diodes that achieve high breakdown fields tend to have higher turn-on voltage, counteracting the benefits to conduction losses that UWBGs a...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on electron devices 2024-01, Vol.71 (12), p.7651-7658
Main Authors: Hendricks, Nolan S., Piel, Joshua J., Islam, Ahmad E., Green, Andrew J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Breakdown
Capacitance
Conduction losses
Diode
Diodes
Electric breakdown
Electric fields
Electric potential
Energy dissipation
Field effect transistors
Majority carriers
Photonic band gap
power electronics
Schottky barriers
Schottky diodes
Semiconductors
Switches
Switching loss
Temperature
Topology
Transient analysis
ultrawide bandgap (UWBG)
Voltage
Wide bandgap semiconductors
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Summary:Ultra wide bandgap (UWBG) materials have exciting potential for power electronic applications due to their high breakdown electric fields. However, current UWBG diodes that achieve high breakdown fields tend to have higher turn-on voltage, counteracting the benefits to conduction losses that UWBGs are supposed to offer. In this work, we derive a loss model for hard-switched majority carrier diodes and provide comparisons between materials. We show that accounting for switching losses and area optimization leads to higher areal density of power dissipation in UWBG devices. Therefore, the practical voltage and frequency operating conditions where UWBG can offer lower losses are limited to lower-frequency conditions where the optimal chip area is allowed under thermal restrictions. In addition, this work shows that a turn-on voltage of 2 V or more prohibits UWBG diodes from achieving lower overall efficiency than incumbent technologies like 4H-SiC at most voltage and frequency operating conditions, indicating the need to explore low turn-on voltage device topologies.
ISSN:0018-9383
1557-9646
DOI:10.1109/TED.2024.3474614