Mission-profile-based stress analysis of bond-wires in SiC power modules

This paper proposes a novel mission-profile-based reliability analysis approach for stress on bond wires in Silicon Carbide (SiC) MOSFET power modules using statistics and thermo-mechanical FEM analysis. In the proposed approach, both the operational and environmental thermal stresses are taken into account. The approach uses a two-dimension statistical analysis of the operating conditions in a real one-year mission profile sampled at time frames 5 min long. For every statistical bin corresponding to a given operating condition, the junction temperature evolution is estimated by a thermal network and the mechanical stress on bond wires is consequently extracted by finite-element simulations. In the final step, the considered mission profile is translated in a stress sequence to be used for Rainflow counting calculation and lifetime estimation. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.