Application-Aware Lifetime Model for Power Devices based on Electro-Thermal Simulation

Abstract

The active cycling (repetitive clamping) of power devices is a time consuming process. For this reason, a limited amount of reliability data is available and the manufacturers most often provide the lifetime parameters only for a few specific operating conditions. According to the well-known Coffin-Manson lifetime model, the key is the estimation of the maximum junction temperature swing. The paper proposes a methodology for estimation of the maximum junction temperature swings on different operating conditions, based on electro-thermal simulations. Furthermore, we propose an extension of the classical Coffin-Manson model so that it can be applied on different operating conditions and for a predefined failure criterion. The coefficients of the model are fitted based on experimental data. The leave-one-out and bootstrapping validation methods show a maximum relative error of 25%. The proposed application-aware lifetime model is robust and simple, having only a small number of coefficients to be fitted.