Failure Mechanisms Driven Reliability Models for Power Electronics: A Review

Miniaturization as well as manufacturing processes that electronics devices are subjected to, often results to increase in operational parameters such as current density, temperature, mechanical load, with potential to induce stresses that may be detrimental to device reliability. Past studies have identified some failure mechanisms common to these devices. Examples of these failure mechanisms include fatigue, electromigration, stress induced voiding, corrosion, conduction filament formation and time dependent dielectric breakdown. While some review activities related to reliability model development based on these failure mechanisms can be easily found in literature, to the best of our knowledge, a single review paper, which captures the reliability model progresses made over the past four decades across these failure mechanisms in comparison with Standards such as Joint Electron Device Engineering Council (JEDEC) and Institute for Printed Circuits (IPC) is to the best of our knowledge lacking. To fill this gap, a detailed review of failure mechanism driven reliability models, with emphasis on physics of failure (PoF) for power electronics was carried out in this paper. Although, other failure mechanisms exist, our review is only limited to fatigue, electromigration, stress induced voiding, corrosion, conduction filament formation and time dependent dielectric breakdown. It was found that, most reliability research modelling efforts are yet to be fully integrated into Standards.