Temperature-Dependent Characterization of Medium Voltage SiC MOSFETs for Solid State Transformer Applications

Medium voltage (MV) silicon-carbide (SiC) MOSFETs have gained an increased interest and have proven their applicability for solid state transformer (SST) topologies in a wide range of applications. The voltage levels of a MV (above <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$1500 \mathrm{V}_{\text{DC}}$</tex>) to low voltage (LV) SST are typically determined from the LV application (data center, electric vehicle (EV) charger, photovoltaic (PV), power grid, etc.) and the MV grid side requirements, and not based on a performance optimum of the MV SiC MOSFET technology. Determination of the performance optimum of the MV SiC MOSFET technology requires comprehensive electrical and thermal characterizations of the available MV SiC MOSFET semiconductor devices to make a quantitative comparison. Therefore, this paper experimentally characterizes the temperature dependency of a 3.3, 6.5, and 10 kV MV SiC MOSFET, serving as the underlying dataset for further loss estimation and performance comparison for use in both MV active front-ends (AFE) and MV to LV SSTs.