November 19, 2012, Seoul - Infineon Technologies (Korea CEO Lee Seung-soo) has launched next-generation thin-wafer IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor) products featuring TRENCHSTOP™ 5 technology. This technology significantly reduces conduction loss and switching loss compared to major solutions currently available in the market. With TRENCHSTOP™ 5 technology setting new standards in IGBT performance, Infineon is able to maintain a leading position in a market demanding increasingly higher efficiency.

This new technology provides an increased breakdown voltage of 650V, offering higher safety margins in design. It is suitable for boost PFC (AC/DC) stages and high-voltage DC/DC topologies commonly used in applications such as solar inverters, UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply), and inverter-type welding equipment.

TRENCHSTOP™ 5 technology offers two product families. The HighSpeed 5 (H5) product family is a soft fast-switching IGBT designed for ease of use, allowing existing IGBTs to be replaced in a plug-and-play manner with minimal design effort required. The HighSpeed 5 FAST (F5) product family is the most efficient IGBT among products to date, achieving over 98 percent system efficiency in solar inverter application measurements applying the "H4 bridge" topology.

Roland Stele, Marketing Director of Infineon Technologies' IGBT Power Discrete division, stated: "TRENCHSTOP™ 5 achieves a significant advancement in IGBT performance, greatly improving system efficiency and providing higher breakdown voltage to enhance reliability. This enables reduction of overall platform system costs. For customers requiring all these characteristics in a single solution, TRENCHSTOP™ 5 will be the only answer."

The new TRENCHSTOP™ 5 technology provides multiple benefits for various types of target applications. Compared to Infineon's HighSpeed (H3) product family, which is currently the most advanced in the industry, conduction loss has been reduced by more than 10 percent and total switching loss has been reduced by more than 60 percent. By significantly improving efficiency in this manner, the junction temperature during operation can be lowered, enabling improved lifetime reliability, or alternatively allowing designs achieving higher power density. As an example, application testing showed that TRENCHSTOP™ 5 in a TO-220 package has a case temperature 15 percent lower than an H3 product in a TO-247 package.

Another important improvement is that saturation voltage (VCE(sat)) and turn-off switching loss (Eoff) are characterized by a gentle positive temperature coefficient, ensuring performance is not affected during high-temperature operation and enabling easy paralleling. Gate charge (Qg) 2.5 times lower than H3 allows for more convenient and cost-effective IGBT driving. Additionally, TRENCHSTOP™ 5 features stable forward voltage drop (VF) with respect to temperature changes of fast recovery free-wheeling diode and reverse recovery time (Trr) of less than 50ns. Furthermore, with low output capacitance (Coss and Eoss) providing excellent light-load efficiency, it is highly suitable for use in designs operating below 40 percent of maximum rating for extended periods.