Performance assessment of an automotive-grade TO-247 IGBT copacked with SiC diode in a bidirectional buck converter

Various sustainable mobility applications adopt bidirectional dc-dc converters to optimally manage the power flow among the power supply, the load and the battery. In this context, the use of Silicon Carbide (SiC) technologies leads many advantages from efficiency and reliability point of view. Copacking the discrete IGBT with SiC diode enables to operate at switching frequency higher than the standard devices. In this work, an automotive-grade TO-247 IGBT copacked with SiC diode has been compared with a standard one, in a bidirectional buck-converter. The experimental results have highlighted that, under the same switching frequency and temperature conditions, the former can handle an extra load with respect to the IGBTs copacked with Si diodes, or a better efficiency being equal the load. The main merit of the work is to highlight the advantages of adopting antiparallel SiC diode in an actual device recently available in the market instead of using the prototypes adopted by previous papers. Moreover, it is also worth to note that these prototypes are not automotive grade.