The Investigation of an IGBT With Hole-Carrier Movement Control

A novel hole-controlled lateral-insulated-gate bipolar transistor (HC-LIGBT) device that is free of tail current is proposed and investigated. The device utilizes a poly-p-i-n-diode as the field plate to guarantee high breakdown voltage (BV) at the blocking state. With the introduction of an extra electric field, the movement of the hole carrier is regulated. At the device ON-state, more hole carriers are injected into the drift region to amplify the ON-state current density; when the device is about to be turned OFF, the hole carrier rapidly neutralizes the extra electrons residing in the drift region to eliminate the tail current. A material with high permittivity is required as the dielectric to generate the electric field that is strong enough to impact the movement of the hole carrier. HC-LIGBTs with a dielectric permittivity of 29 (HfO
₂
) and 200 (PZT) under both BV conditions of 250 and 600 V are investigated. The numerical simulation results indicate that under different conditions, the ON-state current density of the HC-LIGBT is up to 7× that of the conventional LIGBT, whereas the switching periods remain at 5 ns for all conditions. The total energy losses for the HC-LIGBT, including the losses in both transition period and switching period, are 10% of the energy loss at the turn- OFF operation of the conventional LIGBT. Moreover, the tradeoff between the ON-state current density and the switching period of the conventional LIGBT is transferred to the tradeoff between the ON-state current density and the transition period of the HC-LIGBT.