Monitoring IGBT's health condition via junction temperature variations

Insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) failures are a major issue in modern power electronics applications. Two most dominated failure mechanisms of IGBTs are solder fatigue and bond wire wear-out. This paper proposes a new method to online monitor an IGBT's health condition by using the instantaneous junction temperature variation between present and the first operating cycles of the IGBT with the same operating current. In this work, the instantaneous junction temperature of an IGBT is estimated from a thermal network model. The proposed method is validated by experimental results obtained from accelerated aging tests for IGBTs.