Research on Breakthrough Failure of IGBT Chip

Abstract

In large-capacity power electronic devices, fully controlled power electronic devices, such as insulated gate bipolar transistors ( IGBT ), which are widely used at present, are the core components to realize high-performance power conversion and control. With the increasingly wide application of IGB, its voltage, current level and working junction temperature are getting higher and higher, and its working environment is also getting worse, putting more and more stringent requirements on reliability, and the reliability of power electronic devices has also become the most important factor determining the safe operation of the whole device. Therefore, finding out the internal mechanism of IGBT failure is an important guarantee for improving the reliability of device operation and realizing optimal design and application. The research that has been carried out mainly focuses on various external factors that cause failure, namely various failure modes of IGBT, and lacks in-depth research on the internal mechanism of final failure. On the basis of in-depth analysis of IGBT’s structure and working principle, this paper analyzes the internal mechanism of IGBT’s breakdown failure with semiconductor physics theory, finds out the fundamental principle of causing failure, and designs experiments to reproduce the occurrence of failure, thus further verifying the conclusion reached in the analysis.