A Bond Wire Aging Monitoring Method for IGBT Modules Based on Bond Wire Degradation Voltage

The issue of the bond wire aging obviously degrades the reliability of insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) modules, and thus, the bond wire aging monitoring (AM) method is highly desired. However, many AM methods are subjected to the effects of junction temperature variations and consequently suffer from degraded accuracy. To address this, a bond wire AM method based on the bond wire degradation voltage (<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {BWD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula>) is proposed, which can mitigate the effects of junction temperature variations. In the proposed AM method, with the established multiphysics field coupling model of the IGBT module, <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {BWD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is selected as the bond wire aging indicator, which is not affected by junction temperature variations. Moreover, an extracting method of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {BWD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> based on the ON-state voltage evolution model (OSVEM) is developed. Afterward, the availability of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$V_{\text {BWD}}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> is thoroughly investigated by using the double-pulse tests. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed bond wire AM method is verified by experimental tests.