Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Power MOSFET
Summary
A power MOSFET is a specific type of metal–oxide–semiconductor field-effect transistor (MOSFET) designed to handle significant power levels. Compared to the other power semiconductor devices, such as an insulated-gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) or a thyristor, its main advantages are high switching speed and good efficiency at low voltages. It shares with the IGBT an isolated gate that makes it easy to drive. They can be subject to low gain, sometimes to a degree that the gate voltage needs to be higher than the voltage under control.
The design of power MOSFETs was made possible by the evolution of MOSFET and CMOS technology, used for manufacturing integrated circuits since the 1960s. The power MOSFET shares its operating principle with its low-power counterpart, the lateral MOSFET. The power MOSFET, which is commonly used in power electronics, was adapted from the standard MOSFET and commercially introduced in the 1970s.
The power MOSFET is the most common power semiconductor device in the world, due to its low gate drive power, fast switching speed, easy advanced paralleling capability, wide bandwidth, ruggedness, easy drive, simple biasing, ease of application, and ease of repair. In particular, it is the most widely used low-voltage (less than 200 V) switch. It can be found in a wide range of applications, such as most power supplies, DC-to-DC converters, low-voltage motor controllers, and many other applications.
MOSFETVMOSLDMOS and Insulated-gate bipolar transistor
The MOSFET was invented by Mohamed Atalla and Dawon Kahng at Bell Labs in 1959. It was a breakthrough in power electronics. Generations of MOSFETs enabled power designers to achieve performance and density levels not possible with bipolar transistors.
In 1969, Hitachi introduced the first vertical power MOSFET, which would later be known as the VMOS (V-groove MOSFET). The same year, the DMOS (double-diffused MOSFET) with self-aligned gate was first reported by Y. Tarui, Y. Hayashi and Toshihiro Sekigawa of the Electrotechnical Laboratory (ETL).
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.