This paper presents the behavior of single chip IGBT (Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistors) devices under repetitive short-circuit operations. 600V and 1200V NPT (Non Punch Through) IGBTs as well as 600V COOLMOS T M have been tested. The repetition of these severe working conditions is responsible for devices ageing and results unavoidably in the components failures. A serial of experimental tests was made in order to determine the number of short circuit operations the devices can support before failure for different dissipated energies. The temperature influence has been also investigated. Results show two distinct failure modes depending on the dissipated energy during the tests. A critical value of short-circuit energy has been pointed out which separates these failure modes. Experimental and numerical investigations have been carried out in order to analyse these failure modes. A detailed analysis of the physical mechanisms occurring during the short-circuit failures for dissipated energies equal or lightly higher than the critical value is presented.
Index TermsIGBT, COOLMOS T M , short-circuit, power devices, thermal runaway, thermal modeling, reliability.
I. INTRODUCTIONPower semiconductor devices may suffer of extremely hard working operations, resulting from an accident in the case of short-circuit conditions, depending on the application circuit and its environment. So, it is of the first importance to carry out investigations on the behavior of power devices under such severe repetitive working operations. Especially, the questions which are still in abeyance are :• How many short-circuit pulses can support a given device before failure for given operating conditions ? Manuscript
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.