A Lifetime Prediction Method for IGBT Modules Considering the Self-Accelerating Effect of Bond Wire Damage

As core components of power converters, the insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) module is required to have long-term reliability in increasingly more applications. To assess and improve the reliability, power cycling (PC) tests are conducted to determine the lifetime of IGBT modules; these tests are very time-consuming and may take a couple of weeks or even months for a single sample. Therefore, an urgent need in the industrial community is to develop an accurate and efficient method to predict the lifetime of the IGBT modules. In this article, we present a lifetime prediction method, in which the self-accelerating effect of bond wire damage on the lifetime is considered by using the feedback from the collector-emitter ON-resistance degradation into the power loss model, and a degradation model is proposed to describe the degradation process of the collector-emitter ON-resistance. Base on the physical PC tests of IGBT modules, we demonstrate that the proposed method accurately and efficiently predicts the lifetime of IGBT modules.