RC-Drives

Cost-Optimized IGBT for Consumer Drive Application

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Introduction and Short Description of the Product Family

The RC-Drives IGBT technology was released by Infineon at the end of 2009 as a cost-

optimized solution to address the price-sensitive Consumer drives market. This basic technology

provides outstanding performance in BLDC motor drives adopting block commutation

–type of

modulations, were one or both IGBT in the half-bridge are left conducting for 120° of the motor

electrical angle (Dae-Woong Chung et al., IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INDUSTRIAL

ELECTRONICS, VOL. 46, No. 3, June 1999). Thanks to the low conduction losses of both IGBT

and integrated diode the overall losses are drastically reduced. This type of control is commonly

found in Fridge compressors: by limiting the hard switching events the dV/dt and dI/dt

commutation slopes are avoided, therefore the harmonic content injected into the motor

windings (hence the EMI) is reduced. Below a typical example of this type of commutation found

on a 100W commercial fridge compressor:

Figure 1: High side and low side gate signals for 120° PWM commutation switching