Silicon-on-Insulator Lateral Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor: Current Technologies and Prospects

Compared with the discrete insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT), the silicon-on-insulator lateral IGBT (SOI-LIGBT) owns the advantage of being integrated with peripheral circuits easily and is widely used in monolithic intelligent power ICs (PICs). This article reviews the current technologies of SOI-LIGBT. After a brief introduction of monolithic intelligent PIC and LIGBT, a comparison between LIGBTs on SOI and bulk silicon is made. Next, various technologies for improvements in the current density and turn-off speed of SOI-LIGBTs are introduced, and the advantages or disadvantages of these technologies are summarized. Then, the design considerations of reliability and ruggedness for SOI-LIGBT are presented. After that, this article gives an outlook and a prediction for the future technologies of SOI-LIGBT. Finally, a structure that may achieve the breakdown voltage (BV) of 1200 V SOI-LIGBT is proposed in this work.