On the Origin of Thermal Runaway in a Trench Power MOSFET

Over-current protection scheme for SiC power MOSFET DC circuit breaker

“…According to (6) and (7), the current threshold I LD for load protection is 3.4A, while turn-off delay time is about 2.8s. Since the supply DC voltage V D in Fig.…”

“…The possible risks faced are in two conditions. In moderate fault situation, the breaker may suffer from thermal stress caused by joint overheating [6] if the fault current is not cleared in time. In serious conditions like short-circuit faults, the electromagnetic force induced by large fault current cracks the bond wires of electronic switches and causes physical damage to the semiconductor dies [7].…”

Physics-based stability analysis of MOS transistors

“…Stability can be experimentally investigated by measuring the device characteristics close to the failure limit [2][3][4][5][6]. This allows calculation of a stability factor that is a measure of the device sensitivity to runaway.…”

“…In order to overcome the first drawback, physics-based models [2,3,5,7,8] or TCAD simulations [9] have been used to predict and quantify instability. However, modeling and simulating runaway effects causes the output parameters to diverge and makes it difficult to identify the physical origin of the numerical instability.…”

“…For this purpose analytical models for MOS transistors, TCAD simulations, experimental data or combinations can be used [2,3,5,[7][8][9]13]. In this work, physics-based analytical expressions [14,15] with experimental [6] fitting parameters have been used (Appendix A).…”