| Integrated Gate Commutated Thyristor (IGCT) is an advanced GTO-based power semiconductor device for high power, high frequency applications above 100 kW. It has rapidly gained acceptance in major areas of high power electronics, such as propulsion inverters for mass transit and locomotives, high power industrial drives for steel and paper mills, and utility power conditioning.; This dissertation presents the systematic study of the switching characteristics of IGCT and the development of two new physics-based IGCT models for circuit simulation and the corresponding parameter extraction methodology.; In the experiments, the IGCT turn-on and turn-off transients and corresponding temperature dependencies were studied. The snubberless turn-off capability of the device was investigated and the facts affect the switching characteristics were studied.; A lumped-charge model and a Fourier solution model for the IGCT with full temperature dependencies were developed, and have been successfully implemented in Matlab and in PSpice, respectively. A practical destruction-free parameter extraction methodology for the proposed IGCT models was presented. Simulations were performed using the IGCT model with the extracted parameters. The models were shown to give good agreement with experimental waveforms and correctly modeled the behavior under changing temperatures. |
