The Impacts of Platinum Diffusion to the Reverse Recovery Lifetime of a High Power Diode Devices

Abstract

The reverse recovery lifetime of a diode is one the key parameter in power electronics market. To make a diode with fast switching speed, diodes are often doped with impurities such as gold and platinum to improve its lifetime. In this works, we present the reverse recovery lifetime improvement of a power rectifier diode through platinum diffusion in the intrinsic region in between P-N junction using Design of Experiment (DOE) approach. A commercial available power rectifier is used in this study. We factored in the temperature and thermal diffusion time during the platinum diffusion process in our DOE. From results, DOE 2 (with shorter thermal duration and high temperature for diffusion) is selected based on meeting requirement for forward voltage and reverse recovery specifications i.e. forward voltage at 1.8V and reverse recovery time at 27ns.