Investigation and Comparison on Switching Performance of Semiconductor Pulsed Power Devices

Pulsed power semiconductor devices play a more and more important role in the field of pulse power, with their high reliability and low switching losses. It includes common power semiconductor devices such as insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), thyristor, and reversely switched dynistor (RSD) that is specially applied in the pulsed power area. Two methods of high-voltage differential probe test for single device and ordinary probe test for voltage-divided serial devices were applied to measure the turn-on voltage of these three types of switches in this paper separately. The switching characteristics of the RSD, thyristor, and IGBT were investigated and compared by the turn-on experiments. The advantage of the RSD in the pulsed power application is shown by the experimental data.