Review on the Thermal Models Applications in the Reliability of Power Semiconductor Device

ABSTRACT The power semiconductor device plays a key role in energy conversion and management, and the failure of the device would make a great economic loss. To improve the reliability of the device, many methods have been proposed, including the condition monitoring, junction temperature estimation, lifetime prediction and thermal management. All the above techniques are closely related to the thermal models of the device. Thus, this paper reviews these studies from the aspect of thermal models’ applications in the reliability of the power semiconductor device. Different kinds of thermal network models are presented. In addition, the limitations and potential of existing reliability improvement methods based on the thermal models are discussed.