In this paper, we present a 600-V reverse conducting insulated gate bipolar transistor (RC-IGBT) for soft and hard switching applications, such as general purpose inverters. The newly developed RC-IGBT uses the deep reactive-ion etching trench technology without the thin wafer process technology. Therefore, a freewheeling diode (FWD) is monolithically integrated in an IGBT chip. The proposed RC-IGBT operates as an IGBT in forward conducting mode and as an FWD in reverse conducting mode. Also, to avoid the destructive failure of the gate oxide under the surge current and abnormal conditions, a protective Zener diode is successfully integrated in the gate electrode without compromising the operation performance of the IGBT.