In this lecture, we will discuss the Bipolar Junction Transistor or BJT, and its

modern successor, the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor, or IGBT. Here's a

sketch of the Bipolar Junction Transistor. It, it's an npn device. And we have
lightly doped n region or intrinsic region in the collector, so that this base
collector junction, pn junction really has the same structure as the classic
power diode that we've already discussed.
So, under reverse biased conditions, where the collector voltage is positive,
the base is more negative than the collector and so is the emitter. And in
fact for, to turn this device off, the np or pn junction between a base and
emitter is reverse biased and turned off. So, under these conditions the
device is off. And the electric field is in the n minus region that is able to
block the, the collector voltage.
This is a vertical device, and again this is a cross-sectional area of the
transistor or the chip, like the cross-sectional areas we've been drawing
previously for the MOSFET.
So, to turn this device on, what we do is we have a driver circuit, connected
to the base and emitter that will forward bias the base emitter junction. So,
apply a positive voltage at the base with respect to the emitter to forward
bias this junction and when we do that, electrons from the emitter are able
to diffuse across this junction into the base, where they become minority
carriers. Because the collector is, is more positive voltage these electrons
can easily continue to, to flow and they'll actually flow into the collector
region. So by forward biasing the base emitter junction, we get the minority
carriers into the base and into the n minus region that are needed to
conduct the collector to emitter current. In the process, you can see that
these minority carrier electrons can go into the n minus region and cause
conductivity modulation that effectively reduces its on-resistance, and so
Like in the diode we can this connectivity modulation gives us the best of
both worlds as far as high voltage breakdown plus low an, on-resistance. But
the price we pay is that we have a lot of stored minority charge in the n
minus region that has to be removed if we want to turn the transistor off.
Okay, so to turn the transistor off, when we're in this situation, we have two
choices one is we can simply reverse bias the pn base emitter junction, with
zero bases current. And wait for these charges to recombine and eventually
they will, and at once they do then the transistor will turn off. But the other
thing we could do is actively remove the, the electrons through the base
terminal. Actually we put, we would pull, the electrons backwards with a
negative base emitter current that will remove the stored charge in the base
and in n minus region.
So, [COUGH]. So, here's a sketch of what, the typical waveforms look like.
Here we have a, a base drive circuit, that I'm representing with some
thevenin equivalent voltage source and resistance. Here is the voltage of
that base driver voltage source, it starts out negative, which reverse biases
the base emitter junction and turns the transistor off. at this point our driver
voltage goes high, to turn on the base emitter junction and you find the

base emitter voltage then of the base emitter diode goes forward and goes
to plus 0.7 volts. Then the transistor turns on, so it has low collector to
emitter voltage and a high collector current.
And, and it's in the on state. To turn the transistor off actively, what we do is
we make our driver actually go to a negative voltage, and with that negative
voltage, we actively remove, the store charge out of the base. Okay, and so
the base current that we get, base current waveform will go negative. And
actually look a lot like the reverse recovery current of a diode. It's very
similar in shape, so you get a large negative current to actively remove the
stored charge. During this time, the base emitter voltage is high. for at least
part of the reverse recovery time eventually the voltage will go low and at
that point we'll see the transistor fully turn off, [COUGH].
So in order to switch the transistor off quickly, we need this large negative
current and so an ideal base current waveform then looks like this. We have
a large positive current initially to supply the charge to the base and turn it
on, then we have a small maintenance current to supply recombination in
the base of the minority carriers, maintain the minority carriers in the base,
and the collector n minus region. And then to turn the transistor off, we
have a large negative current coming out of the base to remove the stored
charge quickly. Finally, once the transistor is off, we have no base current.
Okay, one thing you might ask is, well, why can't we just build big, big base
current river that can pull the all this stored charge out very quickly and turn
the transistor off just as fast as a MOSFET. Well first of all it takes a lot more
current than a MOSFET, but second there are limits to how large the base
current can be. Very large negative base currents during the turn-off
switching time lead to a failure mechanism that is traditionally called a
second breakdown mechanism that comes from current crowding. So, here's
a, here's an example or a sketch of what happens. So, we have a lot of
stored charge in the n minus region and in the base p region and we're
going to pull current out of the base, [INAUDIBLE] and pull that stored
charge out. So, you can see the way the base and emitter contacts are built.
A big negative current requires that we have lateral current flowing through
the base region. And, really, through the n minus region, also. This lateral
current causes a voltage drop in the resistance of the silicon. So, the silicon
material has some resistance. And so, from the direction of the current you
can see that the voltage in the base would more positive in the center, than
it will be at the edge. And what that does is it makes the base emitter
junction be more positive in the middle than it is at the edge and so during
this time, the collector current will tend to want to flow there, in the center.
So, we get what's called current crowding. And that current crowding heats
up the center part of the base emitter junction more than it heats up the
edges and we get this phenomenon where the center part of the, the base
emitter diode junction, will hog the current. It can even go into thermal
runaway, as we discussed previously with, the case of trying to parallel
diodes. Effectively this, you can think of this is like a distributed diode. And

we want the current to, to flow uniformly across the whole region but in fact
here we're making it crowd in the center. And so this part will run hotter
than the rest. And, it will tend to hog all of the current, and this can make
the transistor fail. So, this is called current crowding. If you have a transistor
that fails you can actually cut it open and look at it under a microscope. And
see that it failed at the, in the middle of the emitter and you know then the
engineer gets told that there, there base, negative base current at turn-off is
too large. You can do a similar thing like turn on, where the current is going
in the other direction and then in that case it can make the current all crowd
at the edges of the emitter. And you can see that with a microscope also.
So, this is called a second breakdown mechanism that causes BJTs to fail.
And the effect is that it limits how fast we can switch the practical BJT.
Another different characteristic of the BJT relative to the MOSFET, is that
the, at high current, the BJT runs out of gain and we're not going to go into
the various reasons for this, but they're well understood. And so this is a plot
of base current versus collector current. For an actual BJT, power BJT that is
rated uh,10 amps and 600 volts. And so, if the BJT operates with a constant
current gain beta, then you would expect the base current versus collector
current, to be a straight line with a slope equal to that current gain. But you
can see that at high values of collector current, the slope becomes low and
the transistor runs out of current gain. And this is classic for any BJT. For this
particular device, it's rated 10 amps, and you can see that you can barely
get 10 amps out of this transistor at all. That's really the limit. And so the
current rating is determined, really, by the gain characteristic of the
transistor. With a MOSFET this doesn't happen a, a 10 amp-rated MOSFET
will have curves like this that extend up to 20 and 30 and much higher
currents. And the MOSFET then is actually thermally limited. So, you can run
a MOSFE, a 10 amp MOSFET at 20 amps for a very short time, as long as the
average is low enough and you don't over heat the device. So this loss of
current gain provides another mechanism but that limits the power that we
can get through the BJT.
The Darlington-connected BJT is one of the classic kinds of early approaches
to improve the gain of high current or high voltage BJTs. And at high voltage
it's difficult to get high current gain at the same time, so a 1000 volt BJT
might have a current gain of only a few. and a Darlington-connected BJT
gives us two transistors worth of gain, and the, the total gain from the input
base current of the first transistor to the collector current of the
combination, now is the product of the two betas.
So, this, this is one of the traditional ways to build a high current or high
voltage BJT, the one problem with driving this Darlington-connection comes
at the turn-off. So, if we have a, say another base driver, we connect here.
And we do the same thing with it that we did with the single BJT, a couple of
slides ago, where to turn this device off, we pull a negative current out of
the base. in the, if we just had Q1 and Q2 with no diode, what happens is
that our base driver will turn Q1 off quickly and then once Q1 is off, there is

nothing to actively remove the stored charge in Q2. So, we have to wait for
the, the minority charge in Q2 to recombine, and its switching time can be
long. [COUGH]. So we have a lot of switching loss and we have slow
switching times. So, this diode, D1, is added to, to fix that, so that when our
gate, our base driver turns off Q1 quickly, we still have a path to remove the
stored charge from Q2 through the, through D1 and our base driver is able
to turn-off Q2 quickly as well. 'Kay, so the BJT is one of the classic power
transistors. Back when I was a graduate student the BJT was the workhorse
of the power electronics business. [COUGH], and then it was replaced by the
MOSFET, which became commercially significant in the 1980s and so in low
voltage applications, say 600 volts and below the MOSFET, really is the
device of choice today. Then at higher voltage applications, the BJT, it's not
just is being, it has been replaced by the IGBT for voltages above 600 volts.
And so we're going to talk about the IGBT next. Compared to the MOSFET,
the BJT ha, is slower switching because it's a minority carrier device, but its
on-resistance for the same chip size is a lot lower than that of a comparable
voltage MOSFET.