Remaining Useful Lifetime Estimation for Thermally Stressed Power MOSFETs Based on ON-State Resistance Variation

The research on noninvasive incipient fault diagnosis of power converters is very critical to avoid strenuous periodic check-ups and costly interruptions. Thermal cycling is one of the main techniques to accelerate the package-related failure progress. In this paper, first, a custom designed accelerated aging platform that can expose multiple discrete power MOSFETs to thermal stress simultaneously is introduced. Based on the collected experimental data, the variation of the ON-state resistance is identified as the failure precursor, and an exponential degradation model that fits successfully with the experimental data are developed. The remaining useful lifetime (RUL) of degraded power MOSFETs is estimated through classical least-squares algorithm run on experimental data filtered by Kalman Filter which deals with the measurement noise and model uncertainties. The essential advantage of the proposed method is that it does not require junction temperature information. The RUL estimation with limited field data is demonstrated on a number of experimental results.