SiC and Si transistors comparison in boost converter

Development of new wide band gap (WBG) power devices, and among them, of Silicon Carbide (SiC) power devices, has been an active field of research during the last years. Potential advantages SiC devices over their Si counterparts include a significantly higher breakdown field, higher operating temperatures as well as higher switching frequencies. However, manufacturing of SiC power devices is not a mature technology yet, their performance being far from their potential limits. A comparison between SiC and Silicon (Si) power devices is presented in this paper. Three different power devices are analyzed, with the aim of verifying the theoretical improvement in the performance of SiC over Si transistors: SiC JFET, SiC MOSFET and Si IGBT. A boost DC to DC converter topology will be used for this purpose, the European Efficiency being used as a figure of merit to evaluate the performance of each semiconductor. An input voltage varying from 250 V to 500 V, an output voltage of 600 V and 3 kW of nominal output power has been developed and tested.