A Survey on Recent Advances of Medium Voltage Silicon Carbide Power Devices

Medium voltage (MV) Silicon Carbide (SiC) power devices have become available as engineering samples. Recent studies show that they outperform their Silicon (Si) counterparts regarding voltage blocking capability, specific on-state resistance, switching speed and maximum allowable junction temperature. It is projected that MV SiC power devices will bring revolutionary changes in medium and high voltage applications such as traction drives for locomotives, industrial motor drives, utility power transmission systems, etc. This paper presents a summary of recent advances in MV SiC power devices, including MOSFETs, IGBTs, GTOs and super-cascode devices. Technical challenges of their applications such as device packaging, gate drive design and gate drive auxiliary power supply design are discussed. Testing results of three state-of-the-art MV SiC devices, including a 4 kV, 5 A discrete SiC MOSFET, a 4.5 kV, 40 A SiC super-cascode device and a 10 kV, 40 A SiC MOSFET power module, are presented as examples.