Towards Accelerated Aging Methodologies and Health Management of Power MOSFETs

In particular, power MOSFETs are of special interest as they are involved in high voltage switching circuits such as drivers for electrical motors. With increased use of electronics in aircraft control, it becomes more important to understand the degradation of these components in aircraft specific environments.

In this paper, we present an accelerated aging methodology for power MOSFETs that subject the devices to indirect thermal overstress during high voltage switching. During this accelerated aging process, two major modes of failure were observed – latch-up and die attach degradation. In this paper we present the details of our aging methodology along with details of experiments and analysis of the results.