Performance analysis and characterization of current switch under reverse voltage commutation, overlap voltage bump and zero current switching

Diode reverse recovery is notorious for increasing switching losses in current stiff converters. A lot of effort has been made over the years to mitigate the reverse recovery losses. However, there exists ways to use this feature to achieve zero voltage transition in the same converter thereby, mitigating the loss incurred as compared to hard switched turn off. An attempt has been made in this paper to demonstrate the behavior of several devices working under Reverse voltage commutation, hard switched and zero current turn off condition. Test Circuits have been constructed and tested at various voltage levels with various combinations of devices. A new form of switching characteristic has been noticed and presented in this paper. The main motivation of the paper is to make a fair judgment on device selection for various soft-switch based topologies.