A study of electromagnetic radiation during IGBT turn-on and turn-off

The increasing industrial application of Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) made the study of its characteristics a new dimension in semiconductor device research. However, the high-frequency operation of IGBT causes the undesired coupling of the electric current with its counterpart. This coupling gives rise to the flow of high-frequency current in a converter circuit. These currents are categorized as common-mode and differential mode current, which flows through the parasitic capacitors and inductors of the circuit. The propagation of these currents through the conductor is called conducted electromagnetic radiation (EMR), and through the air is radiated EMR. The conducted and the radiated EMR both are considered as noise. This noise tends to interfere with the normal operation of peripheral devices. Apart from its interference capability, the EMR recent studies use this as a tool of health monitoring and fault diagnosis of the power converters and power devices in a non-invasive way. However, there are no deep dives studies have been done on the generation of EMR. The EMR is basically a combination of a series of transients during switching of the power device. Therefore, in this paper, we have gone through the details of the EMR signal during turning on and off of the IGBT. An experiment is conducted, and the EMR of IGBT is captured through a standard loop antenna. The spectral analysis of the EMR signal explains the coupling of parasitics and the range of frequency it generates.