Investigation of the Influence of Temperature on Stress Waves at the Turn-Off Moment in IGBT

Abstract

Condition monitoring (CM) technology plays an important role in ensuring the reliable operation of power semiconductor devices. Power semiconductor devices can generate stress waves when turned on and off, and the stress waves released by the device can be detected by the acoustic emission (AE) sensor. AE detection technology has the characteristics of both nondestructive and real-time, and is expected to be applied to the CM of power semiconductor devices in the future. However, temperature and electromagnetic fields can both affect the output characteristics of the AE sensor, which is not conducive to the application of AE detection technology. In addition, it is not clear how temperature affects the stress waves generated by power semiconductor devices. In this article, a novel stress wave extraction method for power semiconductor devices is proposed, and the influence of temperature on the stress wave generated by insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) at the turn-off moment is explored. Besides, a signal characteristic of the stress waves associated with the junction temperature of the device is extracted as the temperature-sensitive acoustic parameter, which will lay the foundation for the future research of new methods for online monitoring of junction temperature.