Power Semiconductor Devices

Paper Summary:

This paper examines how, although power semiconductors were first developed in the late 1940s, they have matured significantly in sixty years and how in today's society, they can be found everywhere. They are essentially the solid-state version of the mechanical relay or the vacuum tube. Some of most common applications include motor drives, uninterruptible power supplies, audio amplifiers, and fluorescent lighting. In particular, it looks at how, for the best device suited for the job, it has become a competition between the bipolar junction transistor (BJT), the metal oxide field-effect transistor (MOSFET), and the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT). It shows how each has inherent advantages over the others and how the IGBT has seemed to dominate the industry in recent years.

From the Paper:

"The MOSFET was introduced in the 1970s and, unlike the BJT, is a voltage controlled device. It also has three terminals, though they differ from the BJT: the source, the gate, and the drain. The source and drain diffusions are separated by the gate. The MOSFET has a p or n channel and can operate in depletion or enhancement mode. In enhancement, no current flows when the gate voltage is zero. In depletion mode, however, a narrow n channel is formed under the gate such that current will still flow when the gate voltage is zero."

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