Failure modes and FEM analysis of power electronic packaging

The development of power electronics technology is driven by the insatiate demand to control electrical power. The new power electronics devices reduce the volume of the converters by three to four orders of magnitude compared to their mercury arc predecessor. And the turn-on and turn-off time has decreased from milliseconds to the microseconds and even nanoseconds, depending on power level. The power range commanded by converters now extends from micro-VA to several hundreds of mega-MVA. Among the new power devices, insulated gate bipolar transistor (IGBT) devices are being more accepted and increasingly used in traction application such as locomotive, elevator, tram and subway. Thus the long-term reliability of IGBT is highly demanded. In this paper the failure modes of power electronics devices especially IGBTs are reviewed. A FEM analysis of a multilayered IGBT packaging module under cyclic thermal loading is presented.