Auxiliary circuit design for soft switching in medium voltage application using 1.7 kV SiC MOSFET

Nowadays medium voltage (MV) converters use Silicon devices, anyway, the interest toward Silicon Carbide in MV application is increasing. The paper proposes a comparison between hard and soft commutation using 1.7 kV SiC MOSFET. The goal of the paper is the evaluation of commutation losses in order to define the needed of soft switching techniques in MV using SiC. An auxiliary LC circuitry has been purposely designed. Spice simulations have been made and some interesting results have been obtained. Another important aspect is the possibility to prevent electromagnetic compatibility issues using the auxiliary circuit.