Discrete Linear Functional Observer for the Thermal Estimation in Power Modules

High integrated power electronic modules are designed with the emergence of new semi-conductor technologies. The increase of reliability of power modules induces the precise knowledge of the local temperature, even if it can not be measured at any location. In this paper, the application of an observer in the discrete time framework is proposed. It allows to estimate the temperature at any location using measurements provided from thermal sensors located at a few precise points. The aim is to design a reduced size observer that could be implemented on a real-time embedded target such as Digital Signal Processor. Consequently, this works pays attention on the design procedure and the computation complexity of the resulting observer.