IGBT SPICE model

During the last few years, great progress in the development of new power semiconductor devices has been made. The new generation of power semiconductors is capable of conducting more current and blocking higher voltage. The IGBT (insulated gate bipolar transistor) is an outgrowth of power MOSFET technology. More like a MOSFET than a bipolar transistor in structure, the IGBT has some of the electrical characteristics of both. Like a MOSFET, the gate of the IGBT is isolated, and drive power is very low. The on-state conduction voltage of an IGBT is similar to that of a bipolar transistor. However, SPICE users are constantly faced with the inability to analyze circuits that contain devices that are not in the SPICE library of the semiconductor models. With the authors´ own computer program, a complete macromodel of the IGBT for the SPICE simulator has been computed. In this paper, a complete IGBT SPICE macromodel is described and verified with experimental results.