Investigating Short-circuit Faults for Paralleled 3.3 kV, 450 A Si-IGBT Power Modules

This paper deals with the comprehensive experimental assessment of various short-circuit (SC) faults using 3.3 kV (450 A) Si-IGBT based LinPak power modules. With four Si-LinPak devices in parallel, all possible SC fault types such as Type-1, Type-2, and Type-3 (a, b, c) have been addressed at 25°C and 125°C for a typical supply voltage of 2.0 kV. A SC survivability time of 15 µs is designated with typical Type-1 fault in the circuit at 25°C and 125°C using a gate resistance (R<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">g</inf>) of 1.0 and 0.0 Ω in the gate drives. For studying uncontrolled operational behavior (i.e., very high di/dt) under selected SC faults namely Type 3 (a, b, c), devices have been stressed using R<inf xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">g</inf> = 0 Ω and four LinPaks in parallel across the bottom switch position while single device at the top switch position. A peak SC current as high as over 4.7 kA has been obtained for Type 3a faults with di/dt of ~ 24 kA/µs for a supply voltage of 2000 V and 25°C.