An RC-IGBT includes a semiconductor body formed having a base region incorporating a field stop zone where the base region and the field stop zone are both formed using an epitaxial process and the field stop zone has an enhanced doping profile to realize improved soft-switching performance for the semiconductor device. In alternate embodiments, RC-IGBT device, including the epitaxial layer field stop zone, are realized through a fabrication process that uses front side processing only to form the backside contact regions and the front side device region. The fabrication method forms an RC-IGBT device using front side processing to form the backside contact regions and then using wafer bonding process to flip the semiconductor structure onto a carrier wafer so that front side processing is used again to form the device region.