Efficiency improvement of PV-inverters with SiC-DMOSFETs

The new MOSFET-generation with SiC-materials seems well suited for power electronic converters up to 1200 V operating-voltage, and particularly for grid-feeding PhotoVoltaic-inverters, which transfer the DC power of the solar panel to the AC grid. Their high switching speed and low on-resistance R-DS(on) allow the use of higher switching frequencies, which could mainly reduce the costs and weight of the converters. This paper shows a comparison between IGBT and SiC DMOSFET devices and first measurements of some 1200 V / 10 A SiC-DMOSFET samples made by CREE (R).