In-Service Diagnostics for Wire-Bond Lift-off and Solder Fatigue of Power Semiconductor Packages

Eleffendi, Mohd Amir; Johnson, Christopher Mark

Abstract

Wire-bond lift-off and Solder fatigue are degradation mechanisms that dominate the lifetime of power semiconductor packages. Although their lifetime is commonly estimated at the design stage, based on mission profiles and Physics-of-Failure models, there are many uncertainties associated with such lifetime estimates, emerging, for example, from model calibration errors, manufacturing tolerances, etc. These uncertainties, combined with the diverse working environments of power semiconductor packages result in inaccurate lifetime estimates. This paper presents an approach for estimating the extent of degradation in power semiconductor packages based on online monitoring of key parameters of the semiconductor, namely, the thermal resistance Rthja and the electrical resistance RCE. Using these two parameters, solder fatigue and wire-bond lift-off can be detected during normal converter operation. In order to estimate these two parameters, two techniques are introduced: a residual obtained from a Kalman filter which estimates the change in the thermal resistance Rthja and a Recursive Least-Squares (RLS) algorithm which is used to estimate the electrical resistance. Both methods are implemented online and validated experimentally.

Citation

Eleffendi, M. A., & Johnson, C. M. (2017). In-Service Diagnostics for Wire-Bond Lift-off and Solder Fatigue of Power Semiconductor Packages. IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics, 32(9), 7187-7198. https://doi.org/10.1109/TPEL.2016.2628705

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 28, 2016
• Online Publication Date: Jan 26, 2017
• Publication Date: 2017-09
• Deposit Date: Jan 5, 2017
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 26, 2017
• Journal: IEEE Transactions on Power Electronics
• Print ISSN: 0885-8993
• Electronic ISSN: 1941-0107
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 32
• Issue: 9
• Pages: 7187-7198
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/TPEL.2016.2628705
• Keywords: Reliability, Kalman Filtering, Least squares methods, IGBT, Monitoring, Life estimation
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/966663
• Publisher URL: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7835255/
• Contract Date: Jan 5, 2017