THYRISTOR

(SILICON- CONTROLLED RECTIFIER)

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INTRODUCTION
The thyristor is a four-layer, three terminal semiconducting device, with each layer consisting of alternately N-type or P-type material, for example P-N-P-N. Four-layer devices act as either open or closed switches; for this reason, they are most frequently used in control applications They stay on once they are triggered, and will go off only if current is too low or when triggered off.
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The SCR is the most widely used and important member of the thyristor family. The SCR is almost universally referred to as thyristor.
Used in high power switching applications i.e. hundreds of amps / thousands of watts Common areas of application for SCRs

Time-delay circuits, regulated power suppliers, static switches, motor controls choppers, battery charger and heater controls. Etch..
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History
The Silicon Controlled Rectifier (SCR) or Thyristor proposed by William Shockley in 1950 and championed by Moll and others at Bell Labs was developed in 1956 by power engineers at General Electric (G.E.) led by Gordon Hall and commercialized by G.E.'s Frank W. "Bill" Gutzwiller.

ELECTRODATA A bank of six 2000 A Thyristors (white pucks).

Basic Structure
Has 3 terminals: anode, cathode, and gate. In off state, it has a very high resistance. In on state, there is a small on (forward) resistance. Is constructed of silicon material with third terminal for control Why silicon? high temperature high power capabilities

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Appearance and symbol of thyristor

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Thyristor: I-V Characteristics

Three States:
Reverse Blocking Forward Blocking Forward Conducting

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Physics Of Thyristor Operation (Two Transistor Analogy)

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ADVANCE APPLICATION
Phase Fired Controllers
Phase control (PFC), also called phase cutting, is a method of pulse width modulation (PWM) for power limiting, applied to AC voltages
Phase fired control is often used to control the amount of voltage, current or power that a power supply feeds to its load In modern, usually high power, equipment, the transformer is replaced with phase fired controllers connecting the load directly to the mains, resulting in a substantially cheaper and lighter system.
Load voltage regulated by thyristor phase control. Red trace: load voltage Blue trace: trigger signal. ELECTRODATA

 Use of a thyristor in AC power control

once triggered the device conducts for the remainder of the half cycle varying firing time determines output power allows control from 0-50% of full power
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 Full-wave power control using thyristors

full-wave control required two devices allows control from 0-100% of full power requires two gate drive circuits opto-isolation often used to insulate circuits from AC supply
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Control of DC Motor

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Crowbar Circuit

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Cycloconverters
Cycloconverters directly convert ac signals of one frequency (usually line frequency) to ac signals of variable frequency. These variable frequency ac signals can then be used to directly control the speed of ac motors. Thyristor-based cycloconverters are typically used in low speed, high power (multi-MW) applications for driving induction and wound field synchronous motors.
Connection of the thyristors in a cycloconverter ELECTRODATA

HVDC Electricity Transmission

Since modern thyristors can switch power on the scale of megawatts, thyristor valves have become the heart of high-voltage direct current (HVDC) conversion. A high-voltage, direct current (HVDC) electric power transmission system uses direct current for the bulk transmission of electrical power, in contrast with the more common AC systems.

The valves are arranged in stacks usually suspended from the ceiling of a transmission building called a valve hall
. Thyristors are arranged into a Graetz bridge circuit.
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Lighting Dimmers
Thyristors have been used for decades as lighting dimmers in television, motion pictures, and theater, where they replaced inferior technologies such as autotransformers and rheostats. Dimmers are devices used to vary the brightness of a light. By decreasing or increasing the RMS voltage and hence the mean power to the lamp it is possible to vary the intensity of the light output. Dimmers are use in both small domestic and for large theatre or architectural lighting installations. Modern dimmers are built from SCR instead of potentiometers or variable resistors because they have higher efficiency .
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A Strand CD80 thyristor dimmer rack

Organic thyristor
Physicists in Japan have made a thyristor -- a device that can convert a direct current into an alternating current -- from a single crystal of organic material. The Japanese team made its device from an organic conducting salt known as -(BEDTTTF)2CsCo(SCN)4, which consists of alternate layers of BEDT-TTF, which is a conductor, and CsCo(SCN)4, which is an insulator. At low temperatures, the conduction electrons in the crystals exhibit a high resistance as a result of "charge ordering".
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Figure 1(b) shows the voltage-current (V-I) characteristics of the -salt. The current is applied along the b-axis direction (perpendicular to the conducting BEDT-TTF plane). The voltage is highly nonlinear with respect to current, and negative derivative resistance is clearly seen from 10-5 to 10-4A. Since the voltage-current curve is essentially identical to that of a thyristor device, we call the -salt an organic thyristor. Voltage-current characteristics for M=Co at 4.2 K. ELECTRODATA

T-RAM
Thyristor RAM ('T-RAM) is a new type of DRAM computer memory invented and developed by T-RAM Semiconductor, which departs from the usual designs of memory cells, combining the strengths of the DRAM and SRAM: high speed and high volume. This technology, which exploits the electrical property known as negative differential resistance and is called thin capacitively-coupled thyristor , is used to create memory cells capable of very high packing densities. This memory is highly scalable, and already has a storage density that is several times higher than found in conventional six-transistor SRAM memory. It is expected that the next generation of T-RAM memory will have the same density as DRAM.
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REFRENCES
Mohan/Undeland/Robbins, Power Electronics, Johan Wiley and Sons, INC. C.W Lander, Power Electronics , McGraw-Hill 1981. B.K. Bose, Modern Power Elecctronics ,B.K. Bose, 2000. F. Sawano, I. Terasaki, H. Mori, T. Mori, M. Watanabe, N. Ikeda, Y. Nogami and Y. Noda: Nature 437 (2005) 522 M. Watanabe et al.: J. Phys. Soc. Jpn. 68 (1999) 2654. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thyristor http://www.t-ram.com/
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THANK YOU

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