학술논문

A New Complete Condition Monitoring Method for SiC Power MOSFETs
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron. Industrial Electronics, IEEE Transactions on. 68(2):1654-1664 Feb, 2021
Subject
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Signal Processing and Analysis
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Degradation
Silicon carbide
Logic gates
MOSFET
Packaging
Monitoring
Aging
Accelerated power cycling
aging assessment
bond wire
fault diagnosis
health monitoring
heel cracking
power MOSFETs
silicon carbide (SiC)
threshold voltage drift
Language
ISSN
0278-0046
1557-9948
Abstract
This article proposes a new complete condition monitoring method which can independently monitor both the threshold voltage drift and the packaging degradation accurately by monitoring only the reverse body diode voltage drop at different gate bias levels. The SiC MOSFETs are aged through an accelerated aging method and the corresponding changes in electrical parameters are periodically measured to assess their correlation with the state of the device's health. It has been revealed that the on-state resistance reveals the combination of gate oxide and package-related degradation while the threshold voltage mainly depicts gate oxide-related issues. Unlike these two parameters, the body diode voltage drop is found to independently indicate the state of device health both for package and gate oxide. This is caused by a unique secondary conduction mode of SiC MOSFETs in third-quadrant operation which is clearly disclosed with transition boundaries by a proposed body diode transfer characterization curve. In order to have a detailed condition information of the device with a simple circuit, monitoring the reverse body diode voltage drop at 0 and $-$5 V gate bias is proposed. The proposed condition monitoring method is implemented on a gate drive circuit and experimental results are given for two artificially degraded devices. The experimental results confirm that the proposed method can independently monitor both the gate oxide and packaging degradations accurately by monitoring a single precursor parameter. The proposed method can be integrated into the gate driver or converter itself to monitor SiC devices.