Solid State Electronic Devices, 7th Edition

10.6 Insulated-Gate Bipolar Transistor

We saw in Section 10.5 that the SCR has difficulty in efficiently turning off the device using the gate. We need to use additional circuitry to reduce the anode-to-cathode current below the holding current to change the SCR from the conducting state to the blocking state. This is, of course, clumsy and expensive.

Hence, the insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) was invented by Baliga in 1979 to address this issue. This variation on the SCR can easily be turned off from the conducting to the blocking state by the action of the gate. This device is also known by several other names, such as conductivity-modulated FET (COMFET), insulated-gate transistor (IGT), insulated-gate rectifier (IGR), gain-enhanced ...