Design of a 1500V Si IGBT/SiC MOSFET Hybrid Switch-Based Three-Level Active NPC Inverter

The hybrid switch (HyS) consisting of high current-rated silicon (Si) IGBT and low current-rated silicon carbide (SiC) MOSFET has been proposed for superior performance on the device loss, the overload capability, and the device cost. A three-phase Si/SiC HyS-based three-level active neutral point clamped (3L-ANPC) topology and its modulation scheme are proposed in this paper to achieve a higher inverter efficiency and higher power density. This paper presents the design of a 40 kW Si/SiC HyS-based 3L-ANPC inverter with 1500 V dc voltage, which includes the semiconductor device selection, Si/SiC HyS die-size optimization algorithm, and the inverter design. A 40 kW prototype is designed, implemented, and tested in the laboratory. The experimental results demonstrate that the prototype achieved a 36.2 W/in(3) power density and 98.9% peak efficiency. The proposed Si/SiC HyS-based 3L-ANPC inverter introduces SiC benefits to high power inverter applications at a lower cost than an all-SiC solution while achieving high efficiency and high power density performance.