Design and implementation of solid state semiconductor switch for high voltage application

In high voltage applications, various switches or switching systems are used for repeated or fixed switching at various voltage and power levels. These systems have shifted from traditional methods such as spark gap, trigatron, thyratron, ignitron, klystron and other gas or vacuum switches, which have been used for a long time in high power applications, to solid state switches with the development of semiconductor technology. Solid state switches are used in many areas such as radar transmitters, X-ray generators, high voltage DC systems, inverters and pulse generators. Compared to traditional switches, solid state switches offer several advantages. These include important features such as repetition rate, lifetime, stability, compactness and flexible temporal control with low voltage levels. However, solid state switches also have some difficulties to overcome, such as serial connection and synchronization requirements. With the development of semiconductor technology, different semiconductor switches such as thyristors, MOSFETs and IGBTs have become available. In practice, when choosing between these switches, factors such as operating voltage, current capacity and switching speed should be taken into consideration. The use of state-of-the-art wide band gap (WBG) semiconductor switches such as Silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), which have become increasingly popular in recent years, provides higher performance and efficiency depending on the application. In this study, a solid-state semiconductor high voltage switch was designed and implemented using series-connected SiC-MOSFETs and passive and active voltage balancing techniques, and then high voltage performance tests were performed.