Thermal Breakdown Failure Mechanisms of IGBT Chips

2018 International Conference on Advanced Technologies in Energy, Environmental and Electrical Engineering

能源学;生态环境科学;无线电电子学

Yong, Tang^1 ; Bo, Wang^1 ; Pang, Qiu^1

College of Mechanical and Electronic Engineering, Wuhan Donghu University, Hubei Province, Wuhan

430000, China^1

关键词: Design and application;    Device reliability;    Failure mechanism;    Online monitoring;    Power conversion systems;    Semiconductor physics;    Thermal breakdown;    Thermal infrared imager;   

Others  :  https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1755-1315/223/1/012024/pdf
DOI  :  10.1088/1755-1315/223/1/012024

学科分类：环境科学（综合）

来源: IOP

【 摘 要 】

As insulated gate bipolar transistors (IGBTs) become widely used in all kinds of power conversion systems, the demands of power converters to the IGBT's reliability turn to be more stringent. Thus, investigations of the IGBT's internal failure mechanism are very important to guarantee the improvements of device reliability and the optimizations of design and applications. Previous researches concentrate on the external factors of the device failures which are the failure modes. However, it lacks thorough studies of the internal mechanism which ultimately causes the device failure. In this paper, the analysis of the internal mechanism of thermal breakdown, has been presented based on the detailed investigations of the IGBT's structure and operation principles, applying the semiconductor physics theory. In addition, the existing misunderstandings on the IGBT's failure mechanism in the normal applications have been pointed out. Finally, experiments were designed to rebuild the failure process with the online monitoring through the high speed thermal infrared imager. This further verified the proposed conclusion and ascertained the internal failure mechanism of the IGBT chips.