Infineon - New RC-Drives Fast IGBTs Enable Up To 96% Energy Efficiency with High Switching Frequency While Reducing the Inverter Size and Cost

Infineon’s portfolio of RC-D switching power devices – which integrate the company’s market leading TrenchSTOP IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) technology and a free-wheeling diode in a single die – offer low switching and conduction losses with reduced area requirements for the driver circuitry of permanent magnet motors. The new RC-Drives Fast devices offer higher switching frequencies to achieve greater efficiency with only small effect on inverter losses. This leads to increased energy savings, lower requirements for thermal management and reduced EMI (electromagnetic interference) in a range of applications, such as domestic air conditioner fans, dishwasher motors and other home appliance motor drives operating at 4 to 30kHz switching frequency.


“The introduction of a monolithic IGBT and diode allows our customers to meet consumer demands for efficiency while reducing inverter cost by up to 10 percent and shrinking board space requirements for IGBTs by up to 50 percent,” said Roland Stele, Business Segment Manager IGBT at Infineon Technologies. “With the addition of fast switching frequency variants, manufacturers can improve efficiency of motor drive supplies by a further 20 percent and once again lower costs as they incorporate RC-Drives Fast IGBTs into fan motors, compressors and other inverter-based systems.”


For consumer drives this series enables high efficient designs of inverters that feature operations above 16kHz to reduce the audible noise to an absolutely silent level. Additionally, in small motor drives using sensor-less FOC (Field Oriented Control), the higher switching frequency allows an increased sampling rate to achieve more accurate dynamic control (torque and speed) of the BLDC motor.


In comparison testing on a 200W system demo board, the new RC-DF devices showed switching frequency improvements in the 1-2 percent range, while thermal losses (heat) were reduced by an average of 20 percent compared to boards laid out with RC-Drives devices. The new device family ideally complements the overall portfolio, which is optimized to minimize the conduction losses that have the biggest impact on efficiency in motors operating at lower switching frequencies.


Infineon is introducing two 600V IGBT RC-Drives Fast devices: The first is a 2.5A device supporting maximum inverter output power of 100W and the second is a 4A device supporting up to 200W output. As with all RC-D family members, they are in DPAK (TO-252) packages with dimensions of 2.30mm x 6.50mm x 7.22mm. Other IGBTs available for this application segment only offer larger D 2PAK (TO-263) or TO-220 packages with dimensions of 9mm x 10mm x 4.5mm.