A snapback suppressed reverse-conducting IGBT with uniform temperature distribution

A novel reverse-conducting insulated-gate bipolar transistor (RC-IGBT) featuring a floating P-plug is proposed. The P-plug is embedded in the n-buffer layer to obstruct the electron current from flowing directly to the n-collector, which achieves the hole emission from the p-collector at a small collector size and suppresses the snapback effectively. Moreover, the current is uniformly distributed in the whole wafer at both IGBT mode and diode mode, which ensures the high temperature reliability of the RC-IGBT. Additionally, the P-plug acts as the base of the N-buffer/P-float/N-buffer transistor, which can be activated to extract the excessive carriers at the turn-off process. As the the simulation results show, for the proposed RC-IGBT, it achieves almost snapback-free output characteristics with a uniform current density and a uniform temperature distribution, which can greatly increase the reliability of the device.