Investigation on the Short-Circuit Behavior of HV-SiC-MOSFETs in Quasi Series Connection

This paper investigates the short-circuit behavior of SiC MOSFETs in a quasi series connection, which can be found in several topologies with three or more switches in a commutation loop. In the event of a device failure, this could offer the opportunity to select a device which had seen less stress up to this point to turn off the short circuit, and thus improve the (general) failure handling. Besides a theoretical analysis, short-circuit tests for such configurations are carried out with stateof-the-art 3.3-kV SiC MOSFET half-bridge modules. The analysis focuses particularly on the voltage distribution between the switches, examining the influence of different physical setups and device parameters.