A novel structure of the reverse‐conducting insulated gate bipolar transistor (RC‐IGBT) is proposed. The structure is connected anti‐parallel with a PNP and an NPN transistor, which are in a collector‐base short‐circuited configuration. Bidirectional conduction capability with no snapback can be obtained by this structure and the turnoff speed can be much improved. The structure can work in two different modes in a reverse‐conducting state: a diode mode and a thyristor mode. Two‐dimensional numerical simulation results show that the novel RC‐IGBT reduces the turnoff loss ( E off ) by 26.4 and 37.7% for the thyristor mode and the diode mode, respectively, and has no current non‐uniformity compared with the conventional RC‐IGBT.